Hey baby, what turns your pages?

There are at least two things this "Marie Claire" article "8 Ways To Use Books to Flirt" does right; one of them is that it talks about books and reading in a slightly more intelligent way than expected from that title. The writer interviewed Jack Murnighan, author of a collection of summaries of all those books you should have read already called BEOWULF ON THE BEACH (oh, Beowulf) to get some lighthearted tips on using books to attract the opposite gender, and you can tell it's lighthearted because in the answer to the first question they spelled ULYSSES wrong. (And all the copy editors in the world just died.)

In any case, some stray thoughts:

• Having actually read LOLITA, I would not classify it as a titillating book either in title or subject matter. (As for THE NAUGHTY BITS, I got it confused with THE NASTY BITS, the Anthony Bourdain food collection, and started thinking about offal, but your mileage may vary.) I would never cast undue aspersions on a man or a woman I saw reading LOLITA in public, but I would cast them on people who called it "titillating." Just... consider it.


• At what party are ANNA KARENINA and MADAME BOVARY coming up in regular conversation? First, I would like to be at that party, and second, that could go horribly wrong. ("I went to visit my friend who's having a horrible time; she just found her boyfriend's been cheating on her." "You know what Flaubert would have to say about that?")


• As for bringing up Márquez, I quote the immortal Rob Gordon: "Hey, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right?"*


• In college, the sole class required of everyone in my in my concentration (or "major" for the rest of you) was a literary theory course in which we used THE CANTERBURY TALES as our main text for writing tedious papers on which my TA, for whom English was not a first language, would change words apparently at random and leave no other comments. In fact, maybe the real purpose of the class was to get concentrators to bond over how much they hated the class, in which case, mission accomplished. A Daily Beast interview reveals Murnighan is a fellow alum, which suggests at least he must have had a different TA. Anyway, that ruined me for ever using THE CANTERBURY TALES as an aphrodisiac, but if Chaucer works for you, God bless you and make you happy in love and life.

*Completely off-topic, but if you enjoy "High Fidelity" and use Twitter you should be following Emily's tweeting of the movie. It's been too long since I've watched it, but this will tide me over.

Love me, love my bookshelf.

My good friend Elizabeth sent me this weekend's New York Times essay in the books section, "It's Not You, Just Your Books," and right away I understood why this shot to the top of the Most E-mailed list online. If you're reading the Times, even online, you probably consider yourself more erudite than the average bear, so the issue of what you like and don't like where reading is concerned is probably pretty long. And for the souls brave enough to tell writer Rachel Donadio about their own "literary dealbreakers," well, there's always the chance that one of them dated someone you know and you can mock them. (Sadly, this was not the case, but I skimmed the article in hope!)

Dating discrimination happens for many reasons, and being a book lover myself I understand when people say, If he's reading Dan Brown, I'm out. I've been poring over the comments section to a related blog post on nytimes.com as if they were a sociological Rosetta Stone. (#155 is my favorite even though it argues against literary discrimination.) I think worse than only reading thrillers or romance novels are people who either say "I don't read" or, horrors, ridicule the act of reading. Those I would consider two of my "dealbreakers." I've had people tell me before to my face that they consider reading a waste of time -- if only they had X-ray vision they would be able to see the at least two books I carry with me at all times.

Two specific dealbreaking books I can name are Neil Strauss's THE GAME and Tucker Max's I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL. If you are not familiar with the reputations of these authors, a quick Google search will turn up some of their misogynistic writings (which I have read, which is how I know) and, worse, their scary fan base. I have known a few good guys in life who own one or both of these books, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule for me; if I see him reading it on the subway, I will steer way clear.

In my short and unremarkable dating career I have never broken it off with a guy because he liked a book I disliked or vice versa. Not that I don't have my biases, because readers, I do, but it has never happened to me. Then again, if I had, my current boyfriend might be the casualty of such discrimination, or I would be to him. We have some books in common, but he really likes CATCHER IN THE RYE, and I really don't. He recently finished THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, which I haven't even read (and at 1072 pages, will probably not get to for a while). But the important thing to me is, he self-identifies as a reader, despite a punishing grad school schedule that adds hundreds of pages to his weekly workload. He encourages me to read instead of scoffing at my hobby, and doesn't every bookworm deserve the same?