It was with some relief that I read Rachel Donadio’s essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about the role books play in our romantic relationships. Specifically, the essay was about book-lovers who end relationships because their partner doesn’t share their taste in books. While most of the book-lovers she interviewed were smart, well-read women who dumped an illiterate boyfriend for such fatal mistakes as confessing a taste for Ayn Rand, talking about the life-changing effect of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or confessing that he’d never heard of Pushkin, Donadio goes out of her way to keep it balanced, interviewing James Collins (Beginner’s Greek) and Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) to get the male side of the story. One can only admire her legwork in finding the last two men in America who apparently still read. Both confessed to being as selective about their partners’ reading habits as any of the women: “I know there were occasions,” Collins writes, “when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” For his part, Burroughs mentions rejecting one date, a “robust blond from Germany” who showed up carrying “an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of “Proust” by Samuel Beckett“ If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”
What a relief finally to hear the truth spoken aloud! Ever since I was a little boy and saw the girl across the street reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, I’ve known that I couldn’t respect a woman with a taste for rhyme. As life went on, I learned that reading poetry in general was a sure sign of an underlying character flaw and a tendency never to pick up the check in expensive restaurants. Readers of epics, I have learned, expect heroics in bed, so no dark-eyed readers of blank verse for me! Plays imply a talkative streak which no man can abide. (Except Corneille. But let’s not quarrel, my love.) To readers of memoirs I say simply, “Get a life!” And on my therapist’s orders, I cannot have a biography in the house. (Performance anxiety. Inevitable death. You understand.)
Novels are an excellent choice, but not if they simply reinforce unrealistic expectations of male behavior, so no Jane Austen readers need apply. (I refuse to be your Mr. Darcy!) And when I see a willowy, ethereal girl carrying Virginia Woolf, I can only agree with Mr. Collins. I’d rather be savaged by a pack of wolves! No, for me, the ideal girl displays a taste for historical fiction. But none of those dreary Russian door-stops in which pale young countesses waltz with guardsmen in the snow. And no geishas, please. (I have an irrational fear of clowns.) Let’s be frank: I like a girl who enjoys reading Patrick O’Brian. Together we can savor his rousing yet historically-accurate tales of life in the Royal Navy during Britain’s campaigns against Napoleon. (But don’t try passing off having seen the movie! There will be a quiz. You’d best know your mizzen from your jigger-mast, matey, if you want to run up my sails.)
After all, a man of my quality can afford to be choosy. What woman wouldn’t want to be with a man who loves to read?