Judging a Book By Its Lover Read online

  Plane

  People love to claim that anything goes on a plane. You’re stuck in a hermetically sealed container with crying babies and coughing grandmothers—why not treat yourself to an effortless Grisham novel? Have you seen airport bookstores? Tucker Max’s latest is forever on the front-and-center tables. I want you to think about this for a second. If the plane were to crash, do you really want a Jennifer Weiner book found in the clutches of your charred hands? (Yes, they will probably find an Evanovich in my hands, but I’ve made my peace with that.) If you’re going to die in a flash of insane pain, at least allow yourself the pleasure of peering down at a dreamy author like Michael Chabon or Nicole Krauss. Watch out for the prospect of parasite readers, glancing over your shoulder as you’re going through the (very many and graphic) sex scenes in True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies. Nothing more uncomfortable than the look in an elderly stranger’s eyes after they notice you’re reading about a woman being tied up and done anally.

  Beach

  Read Peter Benchley’s Jaws. Read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. Ladies: go ahead, be light and be breezy, but don’t carry chick lit unless you’re already in a committed relationship. No guy or girl is going to pick up someone reading Something Borrowed. Men: stay away from Freedom or the latest presidential memoir. Nothing says “I only read on vacation” like the latest It book on the New York Times bestseller list.

  Coffee Shop

  Anything goes. You’re surrounded by scones, wooden tables, and the sweet nectar that has helped make every writer into an author (alongside whiskey—if it’s even necessary to mention). It’s even fine to publicly annotate in a coffee shop. They’re created for reading and writing. One caveat: I’m speaking about independent coffee shops. Starbucks and their ilk are for meetings with people you don’t care to meet with and finishing term papers. No comfort can be found in their too-small tables and wobbly chairs.

  Bar

  I once sat at a bar next to a man reading Charles Bukowski. He struck up a conversation with me about how my night was going; I thought he was very nice. Except he kept waving his book around and fidgeting with it. After a while, my friend leaned over and said, “I think he wants you to ask him about his book.” So I did.

  “How’s that Bukowski?”

  “Oh, this?” he said. “I love to drink whiskey at this bar while I read Bukowski. It’s inspiring.” He paused to open up the book to where he left off, revealing marginal notes and underlined phrases, then closed it again, with evident pride. “When I’m at a bar, living a life like he lived, I feel that I’m making him proud.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re very similar,” he said, continuing.

  “That’s nice,” I said as I contemplated exit strategies for this conversation. See, Bukowski is great. And drinking while reading Bukowski is actually a requirement, so I understand that point. But would I pick up a guy at a bar who touts his similarity to Bukowski? Hell no.

  You can read any of the hard drinkers at a bar: Joyce, Fitzgerald, etc. And picking someone up at the bar while reading one of those authors? Stellar idea. In so doing you are attracting a crowd with an equal appreciation for the solace to be found in a scotch and a sordid story line. I’d avoid reading any of the latest and greatest books because you’ll get a bunch of “Oh, I heard that was good” or an “I just finished that for my book club.” Also, never read business books at a bar. No one wants to sleep with Mr. or Mrs. Productivity.

  Survival of the Nerdiest

  “I LIKE TO READ a lot on the weekends,” the female says, her hair piled high in a way that signals sophistication.

  The male, leaning forward—a sure sign of interest—responds, “Oh, I haven’t read a novel in a while. I’ve been meaning to read [insert name of book most recently at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a J. D. Salinger novel, or a book most recently made into a blockbuster movie], though.”

  Here we have a basic snapshot of a reader’s mating ritual. If we listen closely to these two readers in the wild, we can learn how subtle cues and choices reveal the eligibility of the potential partner. Unknowingly and almost instantly, the male of the species has shown his hand and exposed his unsuitability as a mate.

  Suitors who cite high-profile books as their most likely next read in a bid to impress are clearly stunted in their development. By choosing a book at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, they aim to convey their intelligence and their healthy acquaintance with literature, when mistakenly, they have done just the opposite. This is the classic move of any nonreader attempting to mack on a reader, male or female. Field tests show they are usually college educated, outgoing, and middle-class.

  Then there are the specimens who seem to think that J. D. Salinger is a byword for literary savvy and aloofness. They’ll trot out A Catcher in the Rye, thinking that mere mention of the title will signal their quietly pained but soulful alienation from the pack. They’re trying to signal they’ve been out of the book game for a while and they’re about to reenter with gusto, particularly if it means gaining the reader’s attention. It rarely ends up actually happening. The Salinger come-on appears to be in use by American males aged twenty to thirty years (I’m speaking from hard-earned experience). When confronted with evidence of a lady’s bookishness, the nonreader fumbles and mentally grasps for the one book they believe to be an accepted part of the canon. The reader, on the other hand, has settled the score with Salinger at the appropriate time—adolescence—and long ago moved on. The reader took Salinger in stride as a balm for her adolescent angst but has emerged from that period of her life a full-grown adult.

  When lobbing back and forth latest releases in the midst of the courtship ritual, the worst possible move is to prattle off the title of a book recently adapted into a movie. This mistake also seems to be among the most widespread. Not only do potential mates unwittingly employ this misguided technique, but practically every nonreader who has reason to make small talk with a known reader likes to play this card. These are likely the same individuals who, if for some godforsaken reason they find themselves moved to follow through on their threat, are sure to pick up the movie tie-in edition, revamped with airbrushed portraits of the stars in character. Unfortunately for them, Jude Law doesn’t actually make an appearance in the novel and grabbing a book because you like the actors in the movie version rarely correlates with success.

  Oh, the Men You’ll Love

  IF I WERE WRITING a book about the culture of music fandom, this is where I’d recount my experience dating a reckless, ne’er-do-well bassist in a punk band. If I were writing about movies, I’d share stories about my stormy affair with an overenthusiastic indie filmmaker or a self-obsessed actor. Since I’m writing about books, you’re probably expecting anecdotes about my pursuit of aspiring authors, the MFA grads headquartered at the corner table of my local coffee shop, the adjunct college professors lurking around trivia night at my local bar. Maybe even an adoration of the young, attractive author who just had a smash debut release. But—and maybe this will surprise you—I don’t have any such stories to tell. I’ll admit to my share of crushes. What I wouldn’t do to meet the boyishly handsome Simon Rich is a short list. It’s hard not to wonder, while paging through a novel, about the discussions you could have with the comely figure on the back cover photo. Or how wonderful the role of muse could be with the brooding man at the bookstore around the corner. But, when it comes down to it, my real fascination isn’t with anything so simple as just a fiction writer. I’ve found my love to be for a state of mind, not a profession.

  I can’t resist contrarians, mercurial enigmas in pursuit of an intellectual dispute. Devotion to me means Friday nights debating politics, Stieg Larsson’s rape scene, the music of Skrillex, or anything else that prompts our ire at the bar, and weekend mornings throwing the paper in anger over Thomas Friedman’s latest overly metaphorical article. The fighters, the truth seekers, the champions of deductive reasoning and c
onsidered argument, the enemies of idiocy, or the friends of derision, depending on how you look at it.

  They say you’re supposed to love men like your father. The only evidence I have of captiousness in my father’s kind heart is his advice to my younger self after I’d asked him whether he rooted for the University of Michigan or Michigan State University (a distortion of syntax I found difficult to believe could distinguish two separate, rival institutions). He chose my future alma mater, Michigan State University, because he claimed to “always root for the underdog”—which I suppose is a sort of pitying contrariness. Other than that, my dad is an even-keeled, “don’t rock the boat,” solid sort of man.

  I’ve been hooked on hotheads ever since the boy in my second-grade class who insisted on going by his full name—first, middle, mother’s maiden, father’s surname—argued with my third-grade teacher over the validity of girls being permitted to wear their Blossom-style hats indoors while boys were forced to remove their caps. This point of contention had arisen over my Mayim Bialik–esque hat, as a matter of fact. I was the girl who was making a mockery of fairness. The boy held forth before the whole class every time our teacher told him to remove his hat, demanding to know why the rules didn’t apply to me. He would train his finger on me for the entirety of his presentation. Spencer Tracy’s monologues in Inherit the Wind would give me flashbacks to that pointed, accusing finger forever after. Our teacher responded, impertinently, that the hat looked “cute” on me, and suddenly I found myself taking up arms with the boy. I stood and countered with, “So, you’re saying an ugly girl couldn’t wear this hat?” Hot tears filled my eyes. Eight years old and I was already a bleeding heart, feeling the pain of the more ungainly girls. The boy was chagrined by the collusion of his unlikely ally. He’d intended to keep the argument about gender, not about perception. Or maybe, like so many other men I’ve loved since, he just pivoted his stance to stay safely outside (and above) the bounds of others’ arguments. “No, no. She’s saying that boys aren’t cute. All girls are cute,” he said, correcting me (I said the men I loved were argumentative, not necessarily logically sound). The dispute was finally settled when our teacher suggested that those who chose to question her reasoning might want to stay after school to discuss it in greater detail, but before that I had already removed my hat, in ceremonious and imagined solidarity with my unsightly sisters.

  I find a lot of my fellow book fanatics are attracted to the same type. The saying may be “Opposites attract,” but in our world it seems oppositions are attractive. A disputing nature is a deal maker instead of a deal breaker. It’s an affinity that has its origins, perhaps, in our early appreciation for what words can do. While kids on the playground were getting riled up about sports and music, we had our heads in books. We carried around the objects of our desire wherever we went, willing to leave ourselves open to ridicule. We developed sagged, rounded shoulders from heavy backpacks. And, of course, the glasses we’d inevitably need became cherished attributes of our allegiance to words. But we also developed a capacity for self-defense. Argument. Self-defense with words. And you learn how to recognize partners in this struggle. While we’re immersed in Evelyn Waugh’s fictional worlds, infatuated with Mr. Darcy, enthralled by Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, without knowing it, we are also acquiring an appreciation for the way dialogue flows between characters.

  Words, the way we learn to bend and twist letters into guardrails for whatever logic we’re trying to prove. Read heavily since childhood and you become scarily good at doing this; we tend to learn it through osmosis, never setting out to become masters of debate but suddenly finding ourselves in ninth grade and standing up at our desks in heated words with another classmate over why Mark Twain’s use of the N-word in Huckleberry Finn shouldn’t have been edited out of future editions. And then we sit down, exhilarated by skills we hadn’t realized we possessed. Who better to set your eye on than the very man you were just arguing with? All those romantic comedies, with the clipping banter and sarcastic snarks between the pair before they finally realize they’re in love with each other, make sense to us. Woody Allen is one of us.

  PART II

  Fan Fictions

  Harry Hardships

  WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I used to make wish lists for upcoming holidays, twenty books deep. Christmas and my birthday were the only times my parents would contribute to my book collection. Otherwise, I’d get movies or a tennis racket. Maybe a jacket, best-case scenario. “Oh no no. There won’t be any Kerouac. We’ll get you a movie and then maybe you’ll find some friends to watch it with.”

  For my thirteenth birthday my mother bought me a Harry Potter book.

  I cried.

  I argued she didn’t respect my intellect. That she didn’t appreciate the ease with which I had picked up Shakespeare in honors English that year. I very likely told her that she was stifling me as a person and trying to dumb me down by purchasing books for dumb children instead of The Bell Jar, like I had asked for.

  “You don’t understand me!”

  “You’re right. I don’t,” she said, shrugging. My mother was used to “not understanding” me. Her theory was that her inability to understand me was due to her being born without an imagination, while I had been born with such a large one. As if she couldn’t figure out what pants to put on me because she was petite, whereas my butt was big. She couldn’t carry on conversations with my junior-high self because she never inhabited, or desired to inhabit, fantasy worlds.

  I put the Harry Potter book in the “stupid books” section of my bookshelf and resumed my consumption of what I saw as more fitting material.

  Somehow, one bored night, with my Christmas stock running low, I found myself with nothing to read. So I tipped the book off the shelf, dusted it, and scanned the first few pages in the interest of self-distraction. Over a decade later, I’m a twenty-four-year-old who dresses up as Harry Potter characters for midnight showings, who owns a poster mug shot of herself with undesirable #1 written under it (a present from a friend), who will argue against any Harry detractors, no matter how intimidating. Against my better senses, I fell hard and fast into the fan vortex of J. K. Rowling’s unassuming hero.

  During sophomore-year finals in college, an e-mail was sent to all the kids in my program about a paid opportunity to teach English and creative arts in Japan. Before I even responded to the e-mail, I called my older brother to tell him I was going to be spending my summer in Japan. Born a year apart, my brother and I were similar in almost every way and we hated each other for it. There’s never been one opportunity he’s had that I haven’t coveted and vice versa. We took the same high school math class; we were in the same ski classes, swimming lessons, and safety courses. Due to an ill-conceived casting method involving names pulled out of a hat, we were once slated to appear as Mary and Joseph in our church’s nativity play, and my brother haughtily bowed out after my refusal to defer the role for a year, so Peter might shine on his own, unmarried to his sister. I even graduated college one year early so I could be right there, enrolled and sitting next to him, on his first day of law school. We had a little sister, born five years after me and adored by my parents more than the two of us put together, our show pony years having passed long ago by the time she entered the world. We were competitive not to be last, and not to be first, so as not to be considered overeager.

  My brother’s addiction to video games rivaled my own to books. No other destination on the globe would have excited my brother, as a gamer, like Japan. I knew this when I called him, shoving my trip in his face like we were ten years old again.

  “You haven’t been accepted yet,” he told me.

  “I know, but I’m going to get it.”

  “When is it supposed to be?”

  “The month of July.”

  “Ha!” he yelled, and I realized my error too late. “You’re going to miss when Harry Potter comes out!”

  The last Harry Potter book was due to be released at the end of July.
Another long-standing rivalry between the two of us revolved around who loved Harry more; the one who knew how the series ended first would surely be the winner of this competition, regardless of any handicapping factors, like geographical location.

  The swirl of theories concerning the end to the Harry Potter series was at full pitch that May. I would sit on the computer in Harry Potter–themed forums, under user names along the lines of Laurenione13 or Slythereto, laying out theories for communal dissection. I’d critique the hypotheses of others: “No way is Draco going to make any sort of altruistic gestures during the final battle,” and “The prophecy applies to Neville, it makes so much sense.”

  I ended up getting the job in Japan. My preemptive boasts provided the sorority girls I was then living with convenient evidence in support of the very trendy Oprah philosophy of The Secret. I’d be responsible for guiding a class of fourteen-year-old students in the writing and performance of a play, all in English. I arrived thrilled at the thought of taking my pupils through a modern redo of an Ibsen play or a melodramatic enactment of something vaguely Shakespearian. These were smart, well-to-do Japanese kids. I was sure they’d be more brilliant than I.

  For the majority of the first class, I played word games, attempting to get a sense for their grasp of the language before we started writing the play. We went in a circle and I had everyone name (in English) a national capital until we were all out of countries. They then suggested American eighties bands as a category and, after that, American movies. They were more familiar than me with these artifacts of American culture. I was relieved at their genius, not realizing the pop culture theme of their suggestions was a red flag.