Let’s face it—this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste.) “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s.

James Collins, whose new novel, Beginner’s Greek, is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading The Magic Mountain on a plane, recalled that after college he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on her bedside table. “There were occasions when I 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).”

Naming a favourite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore—or a phony. But how much of all this agonising is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading Candy by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.”

... contd.