Judging Reader
There’s been some kerfuffle around lately after an NYT article on “literary deal-breakers” — that is, what books, or lack of, would make you run away from a date or relationship? Two of the websites I read have a thread devoted to this. Some of the conversation has inspired interesting thoughts about people’s attitude to books and their interest in reading and how that affects compatibility for people who are readers, but a lot of the discussion seems dismissive and shallow to me. You dared to read Dan Brown or Ayn Rand? AWAY WITH YOU!
Here’s what bugs me about this: it means prejudging what the person thinks about the books that are on their shelves.
People have books on their bookshelves for many reasons. Slacktivist is reading Left Behind to do theological analysis on them. I own several books I probably would not have bought that were given to me as gifts and I feel reluctant to get rid of for that reason. Other people buy popular books to see what the hype is all about, and may not have even read them yet. If someone has a lot of self-help books, maybe they’re interested in them for critique, or comparison or systems, or they liked one or two of them but not the rest, or they found a little bit of each interesting but don’t have any fundamental problems that needed to be solved by any of them. One person might like Alexander McCall Smith because he writes about Scotland (or Africa), and another because he writes mysteries. I’ve read several of Larry Lessig’s books and I’m interested in the issues of digital intellectual property, but if I owned the books (I don’t, because I can’t casually buy every hardcover I want to read) it still wouldn’t mean I was a Larry Lessig groupie or agreed with him on everything. At one point in my life I owned a Michael Moore book. I kept it around for a while because he made some good points, but I still think Moore is off-base on a lot of his wilder rhetoric.
For me, it’s a lot more about what people think about the books they have, and if I saw someone with a Left Behind or Ann Coulter book, the first thing I would do personally wouldn’t be to run — it would be to ask whether they’d read them and why, what they thought of them, and all that.
I own a shelf of fantasy books (and more in boxes in my dad’s garage), some of which make up the whole of a series that I used to really, really love but which could legitimately be considered candy-ish and a little trite. But the thing is, I know they’re not high literature. They do, however, have a lot of good world-building, intriguing ideas about morality and government, and interesting characterization. And I’m not one of those people who goes on and on about a fantasy world in real life anymore, even if I was when I was 14. :) They’re not a big part of my life; the fact that I own the entire series is due to my habit of accumulating books and my old fondness for them. I own all the Harry Potter books in hardcover and the first one in three languages, but I’m a lot less interested in the Harry Potter world than some people who own them, and more so than others. I still read a fair bit of fantasy because many fictional worlds are interesting in themselves, and also because I don’t know many better ways of illuminating the way our reality shapes our beliefs and lifestyles than to read a book set in another reality.
If a guy ran away on seeing my book collection without asking me why I own the books I do, I can tell you we wouldn’t be well-matched, but it would not be because he doesn’t like fantasy, but because he’s hastily judgmental in a way that I dislike. Much as I dislike reading some of the content of these discussions, which often sound a lot like literary pissing contests. Oh — your dealbreaker is Dan Brown? Well mine is Jane Austen. He thinks men who read self-help books are wimps. She can’t believe anyone wouldn’t read fiction.
It’s not really about the books, it’s about why you own the books, why you read the books, and at that point it’s more about what you think anyway. Literary dealbreakers aren’t literary, they’re philosophical. And you can’t assume philosophy from simple ownership.