It’s not you, it’s your books

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed—or misguided—literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favourite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers.

Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way—as a sort of first pass—of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. To Fels (who happens to be married to literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about...their level of intellectual curiosity, their style,” Fels said.

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.

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