Should you date or marry someone whose reading list doesn’t jibe closely with yours? What if your potential beloved hasn’t even heard of this guy—Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin?
Oh, the horrors related in a New York Times essay today, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books! I’ll side with those who don’t filter out possible mates by their reading tastes, however revealing they might be. “After all,” Rachel Donadio points out, “a couple may love ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.” True.
Close to home
Here in the TeleBlog’s inner sanctum, my wife loves Jane Austen even if she’s hardly at the Republic of Pemberley level; I don’t, and I’ll be damned if I pretend I to. Thank you, Carly, for standing me.
Lately, gasp, as a reader unhappy with the less-than-perfect contrast between the background and text on E Ink displays and as simply a longtime fan of P, Carly has even reverted back to paper books. On top of that, she has always been more of a video and pop culture person than I am. But guess what? I couldn’t think of a woman more tolerant of my faults or more eager to alert me when she does run across something I should read, watch or listen to, and in the bargain I get someone bright and curious, in her own way, who often enjoys reading software documentation. I’ll take Carly over a Pushkin-loving Luddite, especially since I’m hardly a fan of his works in the first place. If you want to find a wired Pushkin lover, as opposed to a lover in the SO sense, that’s what LibraryThing or Facebook might be for. Not to mention interactive e-books! I’d rather read Dickens, Gissing, Fitzgerald, Roth or my other favorites in solitude, but for those who think otherwise—well, check out BookGlutton, one of whose owners, Aaron Miller, has just written a cogent essay on the need for the International Digital Publishing Forum to get serious about standards for annotations.
Interactive e-books as marriage-savers—and friends of Cupid
Go for it, Aaron! Perhaps along the way, given the potential of interactive e-books for making literary connections, not just the romantic kind alone, you’ll even keep a few couples out of divorce court—those who do compartmentalize. And for eligible people who absolutely insist on everything in one package? I can just imagine a mashup between book annotations and Facebook-style information, or maybe a link to the real Facebook, which, for all I know, BookGlutton may be doing already. Here’s to Cupid, healthy, durable relationships of all kinds, and blissful interactivity!
Ok, gang, your own thoughts on the above? Are your a compartmentalizer or an all-in-one type when it comes to book reading and SOs? And if Jane and Jayne want to join in, so much the better.
Also in the Times today: An online discussion of race in the context of Tom Wolfe‘s Bonfire of the Vanities. Also check out Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal. Do you think Christian Lander, author of a blog called Stuff White People Like, should have gotten $300K for his not-yet-written nonfiction? Or would Random House have been better off sinking the money into e-novels?
Dating image: CC photo from Urban Mixer: “Urban Mixer Speed Dating hosted by Rendezvous Club at Crush Champagne Lounge. July 20th, 2005,” in Vancouver.
The Future War of the Sexes:
She: What books do you read? I don’t see your library.
He: It’s in here [PDA/iPhone/eInk].
She: Oh, let me see.
He: What? You want to TOUCH my [PDA/iPhone/eInk]?!!?
I think it would be fun for Ficbot, who IS of dating age, to give us her take on all this if she’s around right now. – David
One commentator in the New York Times article complains that John Irving is “way too middlebrow”. Another commentator believes that reading “Proust” by Samuel Beckett is ostentatiously upperbrow. And all of the commentators would probably look askance at a lowbrow. This article is remarkably insightful. Clearly, a relationship with a reader who is an upper, lower, or middlebrow would be unfulfilling and transitory.
I once felt that way; however, one day a lovely, bright, and sensuous woman that satisfied my exacting specifications entered my life. She had no brows at all. Our relationship was achingly beautiful for a time. But it ended because she was always reaching for her eyebrow pencil to apply an ersatz brow and comply with the aesthetic demands of a foolish world.
Hi David. Most of the guys I date are too into the ‘analyzing the date as potential future wife/mother’ mode to talk about books—that’s the peril of dating in this on-line age when you can apply your filters from the get-go 🙂 I go through phases where I date a lot then take a break and date nobody. I just finished a relationship with a guy who had some control issues, and trust me, what he read or didn’t read was the least of the problems 🙂
I can say from past experience that while I never would cut a guy out based just on reading, it has been more fun when we share similar tastes. Both my parents have a lot of fun reading something then passing it to their mate to read so they can talk about it after. That’s something I enjoy too and while I am sure that if I was in love with a non-reader, it would not b a huge thing, I definitely do put a love of books in the ‘nice to have’ category.
Thanks, Ficbot. Sounds as if you have a pretty balanced approach. And best of luck finding The One! – David