By the Book

The number one most popular New York Times article at the moment is It’s Not You, It’s Your Books by Rachel Donadio.

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”

It has its amusing moments, as does the author's elaboration of the theme in the Paper Cuts blog.

So what's going on here, anyway? More than one kind of thing, I suspect. People naturally seek out some kind of commonality, but isn't demanding that a prospective date like exactly the same kind of trendy current authors a bit much? One aspect, I imagine, is the same kind of search for tribal affiliation that splits high schools into stereotypical cliques. There is also a very strong element of pretentious one upmanship involved. Finally, and especially for women, it is a search for badges of social status in the chosen tribe. If you are a young editoral apprentice in a literary publisher, how would it look if you took somebody who never heard of Pushkin to a book promotion party?

That said, the first thing I look at when I visit somebody's house is their bookshelf - if I see one. For one thing it's a good conversation starter. If my host has 500 books on trains model and real, I can hope to learn something about the subject. If all they have is the complete works of Ayn Rand bound in gold embossed leather, that's not a dead loss either, unless I really don't want to fight the host.