from the NYT [h/t AYG's facebook feed]:

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

I dated a woman once who went on and on over our initial dinners about how she was "studying world religions." When we finally got to the reading-in-bed stage, she pulled out a dog-eared, fat paperback copy of some kind of Penguin/Norton "Book of World Religions" and proceeded to read a page or two before intently staring out into space, seemingly listening to the ether for an answering sound before eagerly turning back to the next few pages. She was a seeking type, and I imagined that the end of each bullet-point riddled chapter was like a hammer striking a taut metal wire or tuning fork, her reading a spiritual echolocation survey undertaken on a nightly basis in hopes of mapping the invisible parts of herself. Me, I was just disappointed that it wasn't the Hobbit or Gravity's Rainbow, couldn't get over the "world religions for dummies" line that had infected my thinking about her, jaundicing my eye. We dated for a few more months, but she has been "World Religions Girl" for a decade-plus. "And she called that studying!" is the well-worn kicker.

Another woman I met because she was reading a copy of Danzy Senna's Caucasia. She claimed Danzy as her physical/spiritual twin, not realizing I knew Danzy and could verify that the claim was kind of hogwash, based merely on both of them being biracial. We went out for three years, though; among the worst relationships of my life. I knew things were going to end badly when I realized she never finished the book, just carried it around everywhere.

During one post-shack-up break-up it was a fairly simply matter to disentangle our entangled libraries. Me and that woman's taste barely overlapped except for a few big format art books (easily divided in the settlement). Every now and then, though, I still find a paperback behind a shelf though that seems foreign and think of that girl, our whole relationship coming back to me in a slightly enraged flash. Still taking up space, huh?, is what I'm basically thinking.

The big book that always separated the women from the girls though is my perpetually embryonic novel. The women who lavished praise on my carefully guarded and melodramatically doled-out prose are all remembered as readerly titans, whereas those who were indifferent or were waiting for the whole thing before rendering judgment (I can't recall anyone being negative) go into a not so nice pile with World Religions Girl. "I dated that girl for X weeks, months, years and she never asked to read anything" is what I'll say about them in what is supposed to be the ultimate indictment, but that's all bullshit, because I know that behind the polite nodding my listener is thinking: yah, and during which time you also never finished anything. It's only fair, I guess.