This story, a vaguely repellent Rachel Donadio piece in the New York Times Book Review, has provoked a bit of discussion in the blog world. The piece discusses the use of books as romantic markers, a sort of Seinfeldian trope in which “has Updike on coffee table” joins “wants/doesn’t want children” and “snorts while laughing” and “lives with mother” in the list of romantic dealbreakers.
There are a couple of good points in the article, though they’re hidden under a thick layer of superficial. One gets the feeling that the whole notion of rejecting a potential love due to the books on his or her coffee table is really a way of covering, as Donadio kinda implies, for lacking chemistry. I’m not sure why I don’t want you, and if I did then telling you the real reason would be too complicated or hurtful, so I’ll just blame Isabel Allende. Easier that way.
I would like to think that if a guest was actually interested in the person whose coffee table they were inspecting, they might ask something along the lines of “Reading Eggers, eh? How’d you like it?” And if the person gives the obviously wrong answer, which in this case would be “It’s good!,” querent could conceivably pursue the matter further by asking a difficult question such as “why do you say so?” It might be that you’d learn something, whether that’s a way of finding value in a book you’d dismissed or a really solid reason to say you have an early meeting the next day and you really ought to get going.
But no. Books aren’t, apparently, things that allow you to take in stories from other people’s points of view, to learn about topics grand or repellent, or to revel in the use of language. They’re lifestyle accessories, useful for indicating the Kind Of Person You Are. The notion that someone might actually find a good reason to read a book they really don’t like, or a book they do like on a topic they find distasteful, seems to have escaped these folks, who would apparently dismiss a potential date as a Nazi if they found a copy of Shirer on his shelf.
The discussion in the larger blog world was even more disturbing, with threads on a few different blogs devolving quickly from reasonable discussion of the phenomenon in the posts, to commenters listing their own personal dealbreakers. Some of the discussion made me wonder how old the commenters were. I don’t know about you, but I find the notion of becoming close to someone who has exactly the same taste as I do kinda unnerving, and I stand jaw agape at the number of people who claim they’d only consider falling for someone with a set of Pokemon cards that matches theirs. “Not liking Firefly might be a deal-breaker for me” indeed. I liked Firefly fine, and if I was met with a line like that I’d probably state in no uncertain terms that Thundercats had better character development.
(It restored my faith in humanity, though, that so many of the commenters in those threads said things like “I used to have dealbreakers like that, until I met my One True Love, who violated all of them.")
I look at the books I have out where a visitor could see them without heading for the shelves — all of them books I’ve read or re-read or consulted in the last week, or that I plan to start in the next week, listed in roughly that order — and I wonder what a potential date would make of them. The list:
Handbook of the Indians of California
The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner
Koan Garden: Ten Wu Wei Yin Stories, Jessamyn Smyth (out of print)
The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs, Reed Cartwright, Editor (I’m in this one, actually)
The Search for the Giant Squid
Eros the Bittersweet
Glorified Dinosaurs
Clouded Sky
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City’s World Trade Center
I think there’s one or two things there that might conceivably persuade someone I was bone-jumpable, but all of them in combination? Clearly, that hypothetical date of mine would need a better metric. Like checking the condiments in the fridge. Now there’s a window into a person’s soul.
What books are you reading these days? Anything you’d recommend? Take it away in comments.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Books
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