“At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot,” writes Rachel Donadio in a recent piece in the Times Book Review, “literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.”
Soooo true. During my rather long stint with Match.com last year, friends thought I was pretty open-minded. He’s an obsessive marathon runner? No problem. Only wears metrosexual embroidered dress shirts two sizes too small? Why not? Seventy-plus pounds heavier than “About Average” (and thus, not only obese, but a liar)? Well, you never know.
But no matter how otherwise good-looking, articulate, or humorous a potential match’s profile, his response in the “Last Read” field was make-or-break. The Da Vinci Code was a deal breaker.
Donadio claims it’s a gender issue:
Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”
However comforting/nauseating it may be to think that girls are brainier/more sensitive than boys, I know plenty of guys who care about books, and their girlfriend’s taste in books.
On her blog, Donadio asked readers to submit their own literary deal breakers. A few dozen of the 388 agreed with me about The Da Vinci Code (and other Dan Brown books). A few dozen more listed Ayn Rand, Danielle Steel, and Ann Coulter. But the vast majority were readers appalled at this kind of dating discrimination, calling people who do it: “petty;” “pretentious;” “judgmental;” “unoriginal, elite, and self-important;” “absurdly stereotypical;” etc.
For me (and probably for Donadio and the sources in her article), the aversion to bad writing has more to do with common values than pretension. I’m a writer, I value good writing, and probably wouldn’t get along with someone who didn’t.
(Anybody have an atypical literary deal breaker, preferably with an interesting back story? I’d love to hear about it…)
For me (and probably for Donadio and the sources in her article), the aversion to bad writing has more to do with common values than pretension. I’m a writer, I value good writing, and probably wouldn’t get along with someone who didn’t.
For me it has less to do with writing (I’m not really a writer) than with talking. Books are a huge part of my life. I read obsessively (mostly fiction, philosophy, and stuff in my field), and books shape the way I see things, talk about things, understand things. If we can’t talk books, it’s unlikely that we’re going to last long as anything more than casual friends or drinking buddies, and we’re not going to be able to talk reading unless both of us have similar tastes and… standards. So, while I don’t have any interesting stories about authors or books that warrant automatic exclusion, I do have a pretty long list of them. And I don’t think it’s pretentious, elitist, or a mark of self-importance. It’s just a sign that I’m interested in people with whom I might actually be compatible.
hear hear!
I just left a relationship of 3 years and during that time I gave my boyfriend (a nonreader) only ONE book to read. He never finished it. When I finally broke up with him this thought was weighing heavily in my mind. Books are important to me. I would like them to be important to the person I end up spending a lifetime with.
This one may count as atypical: Ian McEwan’s “Atonement.” I hate hate hate that book. (Also, recent New Yorker fiction by McEwan is almost as bad, its only positive aspect being that it was significantly shorter.) In my view, it’s got all the unforgivable aspects of a bodice ripper - crappy plot, stock characters, unearned emotion - all gussied up with preening literary pretentiousness. (i.e., that chapter where the main character gets a letter back from an editor itemizing all the ways that her writing is superb, in case we weren’t impressed enough already.)
Fortunately, I’ve never dated anyone who’s read Atonement. I’m worried what will happen if my girlfriend does though - since inexplicably the man is praised by all sorts of literary critics with supposedly discerning taste. It makes me throw up my hands in despair that there can ever be such a thing as truly good writing.
Also, reverse example: my girlfriend doesn’t really like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Pity, she seemed so promising…