Letters to the Editor

Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
Considering the books that could tank a relationship.
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  • dealbreakers?

    Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Jonathon Edwards, or that ignorati who wrote about the cures "they" don't want you to know about. Ironic ownership and opposition research exempt you from judgement.

  • This is another good one for the "women are as horny as men file"

    Oh no, I could NEVER fuck HER, she reads stupid stuff. OK?

  • yea...go figure

    I like Johann Sebastian Bach and The beatles....he likes ICP and Twiztid.

    I never kicked him outta bed.

  • The Watchtower

    enough said

  • My deal breaker once was...

    An absence of books and the presence of a Girls Gone Wild DVD hosted by Snoop Dogg.

  • Anything by Mitch Albom... ugh

    If there's any book that would be a deal breaker with me, it would have to be "Tuesdays with Morrie." That's almost as bad a guy who voted for Bush.

  • ANY of the "Left Behind" books

    You can read porno, you can read SF, you can read mysteries, you can read Stephan King, but in my house you cannot read religiously based snuff novels.

  • Mine is...

    Marley and Me. I'm a dog lover, and yet somehow this book instills a deep sense of loathing in me, even though I've only read reviews of it, and not the book itself. Maybe guys on dating sites list it because it makes them look sensitive, I don't know.

  • ohferchrissakes

    Do we need to get over ourselves a mite?

    I'm married. We read different stuff. We watch different stuff. We watch and read some of the same stuff too. I adore Jane Austen and re-read them like old friends. I don't know many men who do, my husband among them.

    There's a difference between "compatible" and "lockstep."

    And yes, if I had a significant other who was reading "Dianetics" and believing it, that would give me pause. But what's wrong with just reading it to see what's there? I've read a lot of things under the general heading of religion that I think are bunk, but I'm glad to have read them and decided that for myself. Should I deny my husband the same opportunity?

    I like chick flicks. I watch them with my girlfriends. He likes movies with explosions and watches them with his guy friends. It's fun to find movies we both like, and books we both like. We're both voracious and omnivorous readers.

    But there's a lot more to what makes a relationship tick than books.

  • What an amazingly pretentious criterion...

    Eliminate a potential Great Love because the last thing he read was a silly pop-fluff book? That's ridiculous. Maybe it IS a woman thing. I am much better read than my wife, but that never factored into my feelings for her.

    Now, the Ayn Rand fans are a special case. Chances are, there are very very few non-Randians who read her works for fun.

    Ditto the L Ron Hubbard fans...

  • Mitch Albom and Dan Brown

    Tuesdays With Morrie and The DaVinci Code? Deal's off, buddy!

    In the interest of parity I'll promise to meet you halfway by not permitting any female-oriented "self actualization" crap, diet books, or "chick lit" into my house, and by keeping a bookshelf full of Neal Stephenson (autographed!), Kurt Vonnegut, and Lonely Planet hiking guides.

    Everyone has their thing, I guess.

  • One can read a lot of stuff just to

    find out what it is about. I may have a disrespect for something, yet find that it mildly interested me anyway.

    The whole thing is humorous, we are supposed to put on airs about reading Jane Austen or Shakespeare or some other fashionable or significant writer.

    So much for being REAL-- instead we can all cater to the fake fashion of the day.

    And of course, I would not kick someone out of bed for liking Dianetics or some other flaky crap, but most women seem to revel in eliminating all their options in men. I guess women largely really do not care for men or something.

  • depends on the deal

    I'd never marry anyone who took Ayn Rand, Lenin, or L. Ron Hubbard seriously, nor anyone who believed any book was the revealed word of any spook.

    I'm engaged to be married so casual sex is not an option--but when it was, I didn't ask for a reading list first.

  • It would take some right wing garbage.

    If I saw anything by ann coulter or bill o'riely, that would be a deal breaker right there. I broke up with a girl once because she listened to country western.

  • Literary deal breaker?

    Broadsheet.

    Not seriously, but I couldn't resist.

  • there are warning signs

    I would never dump someone just for reading bestsellers, but choice in books can tell you a lot. One boyfriend had only David Foster Wallace and Nikolai Gogol. I should have realized right then that it would never work.

  • My literary deal breaker?

    The complete absence of books and other reading material.

    I have very diverse tastes in literature and going out with someone who likes different types of books than I do doesn't faze me. But I won't go out with anyone who doesn't enjoy reading. No matter how lowbrow his taste may be, he has to like SOMETHING involving the written word. I've dated guys who were into comic books/graphic novels, military SF, vampire novels, heroic fantasy, various areas of nonfiction, and even 19th century British literature. All of them had plenty of interesting things to say about the books they loved. (Although in retrospect I should have passed on that guy in college who was into Ayn Rand -- good in bed, tiresome out of it.)

    My husband reads mostly nonfiction (right now he's into sailing and naval history) and is a Tolkien fan. We have plenty of literary things to talk about.

  • It's not just about women and how only guys' tastes can be dealbreakers

    This reading of the essay takes a fairly interesting premise--that books are windows to the soul--and mis-reads it as Girly-Girl Book Club piffle.

    Two paragraphs:

    . . . 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. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

    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. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just 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).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”