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It's You, Your Books

A response to Literary Dealbreakers, itself a response to a NY Times article, It’s Not You, It’s Your Books:

From a distance, not reading is a deal breaker, and for the most part it is valid. Like many others, I’ve known wonderful people, in my case women that were engaging and sexy, but didn’t read. In the long run, the lack of intellect is killing. My wife has always read a great deal, but I tend toward the abstract and difficult, Pynchon, Borges, and Beckett - I guess I’m the pretentious one - while she enjoys classics, memoirs, mysteries, and authors like Kundera. To me, it matters that one reads and has an engaging mind.

There were many times in my life that I’ve felt love for books, for language, and for words. Who among us hasn’t? It’s absurd not to look for, to find, someone that shares something so basic to one’s self. The freedom that I feel to speak with my wife, our joy in wordplay, her ability to make the funniest old songs new by changing the lyrics, those ‘yes’ instances when we find a word particularly engaging, are part of what make life special.

Books speak volumes about one’s self, it would be absurd to ignore them.
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