Flags of Compatibility, Book Selection as Rosarch Test
Posted on April 1, 2008
Filed Under marriage, suburban joys, snark, fiction, My Better Half, book group, boyfriends, attraction |
My Better Half directed me to the New York Times opinion piece It’s Not You, It’s Your Books this weekend. I laughed, I cried, I saw my younger self in the dating female who is just so damn glad to have found a guy who reads at all that she’s initially willing to overlook the fact that her love interest is reading grocery-store bestsellers she would never allow to reside on her own night stand. (Those initial moments of a love affair just encapsulate the phrase Love is Blind.)
I quaked with recognition, so much so that I let rip a great big guffaw of familiarity, when reading the line, “If you are a person who loves Alice Munro and your going out with someone whose favorite book is The Da Vinci Code, perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
I can’t help but think that My Better Half directed my attention to this article to highlight the fact that we are, literarily at least, compatible. It’s his way of reminding me that we chose each other for our intellectual curiosities. His subtle way of highlighting the fact that he thinks my high school boyfriend is a dumbass, while he, My Better Half, the father of my children, has read Dickens and Moby Dick and Hemingway and Faulkner and not just for college English but for fun, for recreation, for love of the written word.
This is not to say we read the same things, he and I. His bookish preferences run to the decidedly male end of the spectrum. He claims that every literary novel written by a woman contains the requisite rape scene and he just can’t stand the predictable subject of violation. While I know this to be untrue, I can settle into the fact that he’s not going to take as much as I do from the stories by Grace Paley or Lorrie Moore or Sue Miller or Virginia Woolf. There are distinct gender differences in this reading thing.
He prefers non-fiction to fiction. I am a short story, fiction-only-please, kind of gal. If he deigns to indulge in a little pulp, it is always of the murder/mystery variety and not Dean Koontz or whatever schlock is out there but, rather, Chandler or Philip K. Dick and the occasional Ross Thomas.
If I’m feeling flighty and distracted, I am more apt to grab something sweepingly popular off the best seller list. I can still enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love even though I know it’s been read by Oprah and every book group in America. I am, admittedly, fascinated by popular fiction, at least in part because I envy the mediocre writer their astonishing and surprising success and am always trying to figure out what exactly has propelled a particular book of questionable value to the apex of popularity. I find literary success of any kind hopeful and reassuring.
To My Better Half, the rise of popular fiction only bolsters his opinion that the entire country is comprised of semi-literate morons. The more fuss there is surrounding a book, the less credibility he thinks it deserves. I can’t remember the last time he’s read a best seller of the fictional variety. Currently he has Dashiell Hammett’s Crime Stories and Proust’s Swann’s Way on his night stand while I have Grisham’s Innocent Man on mine. (Disclaimer: It’s my first Grisham and it’s actually non-fiction and I’m only reading it because it contains a lot of the legalese I’m desperate to master in preceding to finish the true-crime novel I’m working on, but still, it’s Grisham, and it’s there beside the bed. I’m quite sure My Better Half is shocked and horrified by its presence in our shared chambers.)
Admittedly, I have loved My Better Half’s unapologetic superior intellectual shtick. I have, at times, found it kind of hot. But right now, I just see it as reason to be annoyed that he won’t sit on the couch with me on Tuesday night and enjoy American Idol like everyone else in the free fucking world. If we’re not watching Masterpiece Theater, The Wire or a Sundance film, he retires to the office to surf the internet and listen to political speeches and catch up on programming blogs. I’m totally alone on the couch trying to groove to the sounds of David Cook doing Billie Jean. I wish he could ditch the pretense for just a little while and take some pleasure in the decidedly fun aspects of popular culture, after all there is some inherent value in Justin’s SexyBack and Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and the occasional Wally Lamb novel if only because these shamelessly popular examples of pure fun, of entertainment for entertainment’s sake. I tire of having to be learning something from someone at all times. Just sitting and receiving and doing little work in the process of being distracted has its own charms and advantages, ones I have come to appreciate more as I age.
Still, as said in the NYT piece, there has to be some substance that counteracts the fluff…”Most of my friends and men in my life are non-readers…but now that you mention it, if I went over to man’s house and there were books about life lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”
Comments
WordPress database error: [Can't open file: 'wp_comments.MYI' (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '462' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date
Leave a Reply
