Saturday, March 29, 2008
Books and Love
Does taste in books signal relationship compatibility? Maybe yes, maybe no, according to this typically on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand essay in the NY Times Book Review. From my self-absorbed location in the relationship/reading trenches, it's the fact of reading that matters. I can't imagine being with someone who didn't care about books; it would be like marrying a Republican! It matters to me that S cares about and knows books the way I do, that his most important packing question for any vacation is what books to bring, that he gets my T.S. Eliot references. On the other hand (hey, why don't they hire me to write those essays?!), our reading tastes are pretty much non-overlapping. Basically he's a boy book/serious literature kind of guy (Auster, DeLillo, and most recently Tolstoy), and I'm a girl book/contemporary fiction kind of gal (saving most recent reads for a near-future post, but let's just say Austen, Brontes, Messud, Miller [that would be Sue]...eh, if you read this blog, you know what I read). Occasionally we do read the same book, and it's a big event--I know there's something fabulous we've both loved that tells you what cool people we both are, but right now the only shared reads I can think of recently are Poppy Z. Brite's restaurant novels. No big takeaway here, just chiming in about me...
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2 comments:
We both loved Gilead, and Housekeeping. But even more important, I think, is that we don't love some of the same things--bad or sloppy/sentimental kids' books, for example (Berenstain Bears, Love You Forever, The Giving Tree). We do, like you, have mostly non-overlapping tastes, but we don't hate each others' tastes, or have contempt for them, which is key. (Well, ok, except he doesn't get why I read so much fantasy).
Yeah, my dh has much more of a non-fiction bent--I can't remember the last time he read a novel--and overall, my reading outpaces his by a factor of probably 3:1 (in large part because I've usually got a novel and a couple of non-fiction books that I'm slowly working my way through at one time). But even though we don't have much in common as readers, it's the fact that we are both readers that unites us.
Here in suburban America, I'm always astonished when I go into the houses of my kids' friends and they are practically devoid of books. What the hell do the parents talk to each other about? American Idol?
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