By Ailene Sankur
A friend forwarded me this New York Times blog post on literary deal-breakers: the idea of the book on the shelf of the person you’re dating that would make you say, “You know what? I think we want different things in life.”
One great comment to the blog:
“I’m a huge book snob, but it’s a devotion to the overpraised middle ground, the NPR and Oprah-approved canon that would turn me off a person.
Give me a lover of James Patterson and Nora Roberts any day over someone who thinks Lethem and Safran Foer are geniuses. Who likes a striver?
The sight of a woman reading Javier Marias, Robert Musil, Frank O’Hara or just about any of the NYRB titles and I’m immediately smitten.”
This is my feeling about books. I read everything from Harlequin novels to (my favorite author of all time) Graham Greene. I’ve read Proust waxing poetic about Madeleins (eagerly) , and Joyce jabbering on about Leo Blum (reluctantly), but I’ve also read the entire Nora Roberts Key Trilogy (Key of Light, Key of Knowledge, Key of Valor). I enjoyed all of them in different ways, but equally.
Proust
But lately I’ve been feeling very nastily elitist, intellectually snobby towards those lovers of anything on the Oprah Book Club.