I often post here about getting people to read and children are most important.  I consider that it must be a rare person who falls in love with reading at after their teen years, so I think we should try and get our children reading young.  I’m fighting this battle with my brother currently, who is smart but lazy and only wants to read manga.  You all will think that I am downing the literature and maybe I am, but the fact of the matter is that (thank God!) we do still need to learn how to write in this society and the only way to learn to do this is by reading variedly and by reading often.  Besides this, I have also always found that books can teach a lot more, like how to read between the lines.  So anyway, I was doing some reading online and found this cute NY Times article by Larry Doyle about a book named Simon’s Dream, by one Susan Schade, which has cleverly combined comics and text to provide a very appealing book for youngsters:

Tricking children into reading has a long and mostly honorable history. Key to the con are coupling pictures, which are fascinating and adorable, with letters and words, which are alphanumeric. This duplicity dates back at least to the 17th century and Comenius’ “Orbis Sensualium Pictus,” a primer with woodcuts designed to hoodwink the young into thinking Latin was going to be a treat. Advances in technology and desperation have added color to the ruse, along with pop-ups and pull-tabs, scent strips, sound chips and touch-and-feelies, none of which approach the sensual pleasures of Lego Star Wars or Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

And so, despite our chicanery, we find ourselves facing a new challenge: the rising scourge of reluctant readers, or boys as they are often known. They are neither dyslexic nor attention-deficient, nor do they have any decent excuse for not reading. They can; they just won’t.

Curiously the perfect weapon against rampant aliteracy emerged more than 50 years ago in the form of an utterly addictive synthesis of word and picture: the comic book. Boys gobbled up illustrated stories of heroic mayhem with such relish that adults became alarmed, and the comic book fell into disrepute — just as well, since the 1954 Comics Code sucked all the bloody fun out of them.

Today parents would be less than horrified to discover their reluctant reader huddled under the covers with “Two-Fisted Tales” and a flashlight. Instead they would probably rush to a Nurturance Forum to ask for recommendations vis-à-vis halogen versus L.E.D. reading lamps.

Publishers have taken note of the treacherous attraction of comics, too, and have begun incorporating them more fully into books for young readers. Typically, comics appear as artifacts created by the main character, such as the eponymous “Captain Underpants” in Dav Pilkey’s wildly successful series, or Jimmy Jibbet’s heartfelt flailings in Jules Feiffer’s wonderful “Man in the Ceiling.” In these, the comics illuminate and reflect, but aren’t strictly part of the narrative; it would be hard to imagine the story without them, but not impossible.

Susan Schade and Jon Buller’s “Fog Mound” series has taken this idea a step further. The wife-and-husband writer-illustrator team tell their story in alternating chapters of prose and graphics, and the combination works seamlessly, and delightfully.

In “Travels of Thelonious,” released in 2006, the title character, a talking chipmunk, is flooded out of his comfortable forest home and washed downriver to the City of Ruins, where humans once lived before they used everything up and went away. There he meets a grumpy porcupine, a comical lizard and a mechanically gifted bear in a skirt, who builds a helicopter to take them to Fog Mound, an animal Shangri-La where even the carnivores are vegetarians and the communal farms take from each according to his ability, etc. (Parents who don’t believe in evolution or the environment or in everybody getting along would be advised instead to purchase William J. Bennett’s “Children’s Treasury of Virtues.”)

Last fall, “Faradawn” followed our plucky gang, joined by a girl chipmunk and a miniature unfrozen scientist named Bill, to a mysterious island under siege by genetically enhanced crabs and their giant robots.

“Simon’s Dream,” the brand-new book in the series, involves thought-controlled flying couches and a final battle against the evil Dragon Lady and her hybrid ratmink minions, and reveals what really happened to the humans (“unforeseen consequences”) and why this trilogy exists.

This is perhaps not great literature. It doesn’t have the historic sweep of “Ivanhoe,” I assume, since my father never could get me to read that one. Nor does its whimsy rise to the wonder of Lewis Carroll’s Alice adventures, books I can’t interest my children in, even though one of them is named Alice. But with echoes of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Planet of the Apes,” the “Fog Mound” books read like breezy myth, with enough genuine invention and adventure to keep the story moving.

Our reluctant reader is Ben, age 9. He is tremendously gifted, of course, but his voluntary reading has been so far limited to “Calvin and Hobbes” collections and Googling cheat codes. After having had some success with Jules Feiffer’s books, we picked up “Travels of Thelonious.” Ben propelled through it, devouring each graphic chapter and then reading the prose chapters — at first simply to get to the next comic. With “Faradawn,” we had trouble getting him to turn off the light the first night, and late one Saturday morning his mother went in to wake him and discovered he had already been up for an hour, reading. I agreed to review the series primarily to get my hands on the third one.

Here’s Ben’s review of “Simon’s Dream”:

Just five words: It is a great book! Pretty much any kid would like it because it’s half regular reading, but then, yay, comic!

I’d love to say that Ben was delighted to write this review because he wanted to get the word out to other reluctant readers. But I think it might be because I said I’d split the money with him. Parents might want to try that approach as well.

I started trying to learn French. Don’t ask me why. I think I just want to occupy my mind and I found several good resources online. And I’m also having a lot of trouble with my second novella idea. The beginning for me is always the hardest. So I’ve put it away for a while, because sometimes the best thing to do when stuck on something is to move off to something else. It seems to me that that is what Jeanette Winterson is doing in her article on “Sartre and the problems with British public transport.” It’s a rant they way many of us rant, flowing from one thing to another, one complaint opens up our eyes to another issue.  I think her dread of the “doom” of public transport, the cramped and sweaty anonymity of it lead her to think about tearing down of other people.  It’s strange.  I found it interesting when she writes that:

It is only two years since Hazel Rowley’s excellent Lives and Loves appeared, but that book is kinder, more sympathetic, and perhaps less tough on the two French giants of culture. A Dangerous Liaison is one of those take-apart-the-engine types of biography, with no care for the damage done to the vehicle, the vehicle being the work, which is really the only thing we can legitimately ask of a writer.

The trouble with the fashion for exposing everything - yes, everything - about the lives of writers and artists, is that no one, genius or window cleaner, can survive such a process. Inevitably, a biography such as this plays to the envy and inertia of those hellish others, who, achieving little themselves, froth with delight at the failures of those who have made a difference. For all the sex, power, drink, arrogance, failure, and compromise, Sartre remains a hugely important cultural figure. Contradictions and oppositions lie side by side and do not cancel each other out. I read the best of him, skip over the rest, but A Dangerous Liasion might encourage new readers and students to skip it all - and feel justified. A pity.

I agree with parts of this, but I don’t know if I can agree with the whole.  I agree that tearing down people, just for the sake of tearing them down, the culture of the expose is, at all times problematic.  But can we only legitimately expect to review the work of a philosopher.  The thing about the love of knowledge is that it seems requisite that the proponent have follow his or her philosophy and that the thing be internally consistent.  Of course, an open mind on every side is key, and it is important to know all sides of an issue before assuming a position.  But if Sartre’s reputation gets a little cut up in this whole learning process of opinion vs. opinion, fact vs. fact, and book vs. book, so be it.

I finished my novella (Did I tell you?) and am now working on the idea for another one. But, you know, I dread critique. My skin isn’t tough enough yet. But I dread more to be a bad writer, or a formulaic one. I don’t think that, just because, I’m relatively young my literature has to deal with sex and angst and that in an unsophisticated and juvenile way. I want my writing, whatever the genre, to be bold and beautiful, in the since of having a meaning beyond me and even beyond the confines of the world created in the text. I want to build upon the “kernel of truth;” “to use writing as an art, not as a method of selfexpression.” Writing is, of course, a good outlet for such frustrations but the youth literature of first Japan and its cellular literature and now China disturbs me. It is certainly not a trend that I would like to see bleed into American youth’s hands, though they aren’t reading anyway. It chills me to read in Aventurina King’s NY Times essay that

While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers or forces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the other post-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social ideals of the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t pose any threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”

Tao Dongfeng, a professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing who has harshly criticized some post-’80s writers for their lack of social conscience and their reliance on overblown fantasy elements, said young fans see authors like Guo less as writers than as “entertainment idols.” “What they write isn’t important,” he said. “What’s important is Han Han’s looks, the cars that he drives.”

Such things are certainly important to the authors themselves. I met with Guo last summer in a newly built upscale area on the outskirts of Shanghai, in the offices of Ke Ai (a homophone of the Chinese word for “cute”), the entertainment company he established in 2004 to produce teenage literary magazines like “I5land” and “Top Novel.” He enthusiastically demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of “American Idol” and his excitement at seeing the “Transformers” movie. An hour before the interview, I had phoned to ask if I could take his picture. He politely refused, saying an hour wasn’t long enough to prepare. “My fans worry about whether I look good, what clothes I wear,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”

I guess it’s just my old fashioned sensibilities, but I think writing should be active and purposeful. There should be deep beauty in it. I’m expressing myself poorly on the point, because of course, beauty is relative, but I abhor the thought of suicide, rape, pregnancy and murder becoming the formula that sells for young adult fiction in any community. That desensitizes one to the true nature of such things and it all becomes a bad play instead of a call to think and to act. And the artists themselves are a part of that. King’s essay states that:

Guo’s second novel, “Never Flowers in Never Dreams,” a love triangle featuring harmless forays into the Beijing underworld, was published while he was studying film at Shanghai University. It sold 600,000 copies in its first month. Soon after, Guo was accused of plagiarizing the novel from Zhuang Yu’s “In and Out of the Circle.” In 2006, a court ordered him to pay $25,000 to Zhuang Yu and to apologize. Guo paid the judgment but refused to apologize or admit any wrongdoing. The press was outraged, calling Guo “Super Plagiarism Boy,” a play on “Super Voice Girls,” the Chinese equivalent of “American Idol.” When the author Wang Shuo, famous for his best-selling novels about Beijing drifters and lowlifes published in the late 1980s and early ’90s, denounced Guo as an “out-and-out thief” with “no sense of decency,” Guo replied that it was only “normal for the previous generation to discipline the later generation.”

Guo remains unbothered by the episode. “A lot of people who criticize you, they haven’t read your works, they really don’t understand what this thing is, so I don’t pay attention to those opinions,” he told me.

Neither, apparently, do his fans. While the case was still in process, Guo produced a musical album, “Lost,” a thin spread of guitar and piano under lyrics about young love, performed by singers chosen in a national competition he organized. It sold 400,000 copies. Last year, his novel “Cry Me a River,” about the ostracism and suicide of a pregnant high school student, sold a million copies in 10 days.

But that’s fame anywhere, right? We don’t always hold people accountable financially. I guess my worst fear is that of an end of days of literature, replaced by pop culture and bright lights that hide behind them a dearth, a death, and a severe lack of art in its execution which is what “explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.” Well said, Virginia.

The folks at BronteBlog have pointed out what does indeed seem to be a very promising comic book adaptation of Jane Eyre. It’s from Classical Comics, the same people who have made some Shakespeare adaptations (see comments from the Shakespeare on Ink post). These are set to come out in September of this year, and I may buy one, if the rest are as good as these few pages.

Death is often something that we fear. It seems like an end, a stop. Though, I’m with Emily Dickinson and John Donne, it’s only a pause; “I finished knowing, then..” Still, it separates the living from the non-living and thus, people knowingly and consciously facing death can often feel a sharpness of mind and a desire to get things done. The London Times’ David Baddiel starts thinking about death, its affect on writers, and its marketability in the industry through a book by Julian Barnes:

I’M PRESENTLY READING Julian Barnes’s excellent new work, Nothing to be Frightened Of, which is a meditation on death. In fact, the word “meditation” doesn’t really describe it: an obsessive rumination, perhaps, or a horrifically fascinated working-through of anything anyone might ever think on the subject. It’s like when you get a song in your head and can’t get rid of it, only in Barnes’s case it’s a song written by the Grim Reaper himself, lyrically describing his own demise.

Martin Amis once said, about death, you get past 40 and you wonder how you ever thought about anything else: Barnes is 60, and indeed, if you multiply Amis’s idea by a factor of about 20, you might get near the state of mind of which this book is a tour. I make this clear because, as Jane Shilling pointed out in her review in these pages a fortnight ago, the publisher has not. On the back of the book, we are told that it is “many things” including “a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philospher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.”

Let me rewrite that as it should be: it’s a family memoir, about how his parents DIED, and how he felt about their DEATH, a celebration of art about DEATH - and also THE AFTERLIFE and how he feels about that NOW HE KNOWS IT DOESN’T EXIST - an argument with and about God because God has created a world in which we DIE and also HE DOESN’T EXIST SO WE’RE HEADING TO OBLIVION and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard who is DEAD and wrote loads and loads about DEATH. Oh, and a meditation on mortality and the fear of death.

Clearly, someone at Jonathan Cape thought that this version wouldn’t sell, so instead tried to, as it were, bury the whole death thing: or at least, pretend that Barnes had written a sort of autobiography with maybe the odd bleak thought about what happens when autobiography ends. Thank goodness this editor isn’t responsible for any other important works of literature, otherwise we might soon be seeing a new edition of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice retitled as A Great Composer Has a Bit of a Thing for a Young Boy and Yes All Right He Dies in the End But You’d Hardly Notice in Fact You Could Actually Just Miss That Bit Out: In Venice.

I don’t quite understand the notion that a book about death is a sales turn-off. There are many words whose appearance on the back of a book might put me off - fun, shag, crazy, hunk, lad, girly, Zeitgeist, uplifting, light-hearted, golf, Finnish, Bridget Jones-esque (unless it’s actually by Helen Fielding), any adjectives that describe the writing as spare, clean or simple, and of course any combination of the words Jeffrey and Archer - but death is not one of them. There are only three things that I’ve ever really wanted to read about - sex, love and death - and as I get older, I find that it’s the last of these that most attracts my attention: which may be because as I get older, the first two become less relevant, or because as I get older, I’m more interested in how the first two turn out to be entirely informed by the third.

One of the joys of literature - and one of few good things about death - is watching great writers come to terms with it in their work. The reason that Philip Roth is working, some would say, at the height of his powers now, at 75, is that he’s clearly being driven by death: partly a need to say all that he can before he dies, and partly just, faced with its huge oncoming shadow, he’s doing the only thing he can: writing it out. In great writers - at least the ones who haven’t lost it completely from senility or mental exhaustion - death focuses the mind.

Perhaps Barnes, who in his book is continually searching rather fruitlessly for consolation in the face of death, can take comfort from that: perhaps, being so focused, he is yet to write his greatest novel, about death. Failing that he could remember that death does sell: it just depends on the context. If the publisher turns out to be correct and Nothing to be Frightened Of doesn’t hit the bestseller lists because of its grim subject matter it could always be repackaged as a piece of crime fiction - not a bad title for one, actually - by Barnes’s old alter-ego Dan Kavanagh. And then, presumably, they’d be entirely happy to splash big on the back with the word DEATH.

Marketed especially for “Shakespeare-phobes,” Cliffnotes (yeah, you know who they are) is marketing Shakespeare manga editions of Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Ceasar, and Romeo and Juliet. It describes itself as

Passion and poison. Deception and revenge. Betrayal and assassination. Ambition and murder. Politics and greed. Plots and counterplots. Supernatural visitations and evil manipulation. Packed with drama, excitement, and emotion, Shakespeare’s tragedies are a natural in the fast-paced manga format.

• A four-page introduction to each book sets the stage and gets you into the action.

• Text is greatly abridged, so reading these isn’t tedious torture.

• The original Shakespearean text is used so you’ll recognize famous passages.

• Each book was illustrated by a talented manga artist and abridged by Adam Sexton, a professor of literature and writing at NYU.

• Unlike traditional manga, these books read front to back and left to right, the way you’re used to reading.

• For authenticity, the books remain true to the setting and the time of Shakespeare’s original work.

Judge Robert Patterson, who is presiding over the Harry Potter Lexicon case, has described J.K. Rowling’s work as gibberish, which I find hilarious, if inaccurate. Here’s the short London Times article by Kevin Dowling.

J. K. Rowling heard her work described as “gibberish” by a US judge yesterday at the end of a three-day trial into an unauthorised encyclopaedia of her Harry Potter novels.

Rowling has asked the federal court in New York to block publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a guide to the characters, places and spells in her novels, written by Steven Vander Ark, 50, a former school librarian.

District Judge Robert Patterson Jr said that he had read the first half of the first Harry Potter novel to his grandchildren, but found the “magical world hard to follow, filled with strange names and words that would be gibberish in any other context.

“I found it extremely complex,” he said, suggesting that a reference guide might be useful.

Rowling said she was “vehemently anti-censorship; and generally supportive of the right of other authors to write books about her novels”. But she said Vander Ark had “plundered” her prose and merely reprinted it in an A-to-Z format.

A decision in the case is not expected soon. It will be weeks before lawyers finish filing documents, and possibly longer before a verdict is given. Judge Patterson is deciding the case, rather than a jury.

However, what is much less funny is people’s reactions to this comment. On the page of this same article, people have gone on about religion, about stupid Americans and attention spans, and all manner of comments that really have nothing to do with the core of the case. The facts are that this is a case about whether or not Steven Vander Ark has used Rowling’s own words to define her own words, and is therefore plagiarizing. I don’t think that it is possible for the public to have a view on this case since we, none of us, have the offending text in hand. Since the public obviously can’t keep its head on about what’s important in the case, how can they expect the judge to?  And so much the worse for Rowling’s lawyers.   Both sides have brought in very similar witnesses to be naysayers and supporters, but we just don’t know what Vander Ark’s book looks like. But I do think that it’s fair for the Lexicon to use quoted form the book, but for the information to be fair use in the way, say a book on Woolf’s Between the Acts might be, the texts must be treated in a scholarly manner. But that’s all I can say… except that at least one of the commenters has called Rowling’s books “brilliant” and while I enjoyed them and found them easy reads, “brilliant” is certainly stretching a point. It’s not Shakespeare, people. The Telegraph’s Sam Leith phrases it nicely when he says that:

JK Rowling complains that Mr Vander Ark has “plundered” her prose and reproduced it in an A-Z format. That is - at the extreme end of it - precisely what a concordance does. I have sympathy with Rowling’s hurt feelings - in particular because she has announced plans to produce her own encyclopedia, and I can understand that Warner Brothers is keen to put down a legal marker of some sort.

But this would put down a legal marker of the wrong sort. It should remain clearly legitimate for people to publish, and profit from, scholarly work on any author in or out of copyright. Rowling herself has in the past shown great good sense and generosity with her copyright. She gives her blessing to the huge number of fans who write their own Potter stories online for fun, for instance, and has let several for-profit parodies pass unmenaced.

This seems to me an instance where - if Mr Vander Ark is determined not to back down as a courtesy to the woman whose work he professes to admire - she were best to grit her teeth and bear it. “Are we the owners of our own work?” she asks. Once that work has travelled out into the world, I’m afraid the true answer is: not entirely.

I’m not against print-on-demand technologies because I think it offers some writers a viable new venue and doesn’t necessarily have to be vanity printing. But, as with most technology that deals with human affairs like creativity, there are some drawbacks. The London Times has pointed out one Philip M Parker who has created over 200, 000 titles (albeit mostly statistic books from what I can see) using print on demand technology. But the worst part is that, by his own admission, automation produced a large part of his works. And he’s planning to move into romance novels and poetry. that’s what freaks me out. No matter how formulaic either genre can be, in the most juvenile hands, it is still something human. The idea of automated poetry makes my skin crawl. Take a look at this article that hints at a possible disturbing future:

Robots wrote my bestseller

Philip M. Parker has written over 200,000 books, and all of them have turned a profit. How does he do it? With the magic of computers

Michael Moran

Try to think of the most prolific author you know and your mind will probably turn to one of those writers of thick adventure paperbacks who cannot be prevented, even by death, from producing a new action-packed blockbuster every holiday season.

Even the most productive of them would be outstripped, though, by Philip M. Parker. Through his own print-on-demand imprint Icon Group International he currently has 200,000 books currently available on Amazon.com. By contrast that shy creature Anonymous has a paltry 12,133 titles listed over a much longer career.

Parker’s creative fecundity can be ascribed, at least in part, to a reliance on computer programmes to generate a substantial part of his literary output. As he explains in an interview with the New York Times, he sees himself as “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands” in the same way that Henry Ford pioneered the mass-production of the automobile. “Every single step we could think of” he says “we automated.”

Sales are rarely in excess of a few hundred copies per title but print-on-demand means that Parker has no great warehouse of dead inventory waiting for a reader. The books exist only on computer disk until an order has been placed.

Most of the titles so far are textbooks generated by scripts searching the Internet for information on the subject, but plans are already in hand for a series of romance novels and volumes of poetry.

Given the growing scope of the Google Book Search project, which reads books and uploads them to the Internet, it’s now possible to foresee a literary future in which human intervention is no longer required.

We’ve got to use the force for good, not evil, guys.

The media has sunk its short teeth into a visit made by Randolph College’s (my alma mater) American Culture Program, to a brothel in Nevada as they study development issues in the nation including water rights, gambling, tourism, as well as sex trafficking. How slow a news day does it have to be in order to get this in the news, really? Any way, I think its quite funny. Maybe they’ll meet their enrollment goals now.

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, April 11, 2008 (NBC) – How does going to a brothel for a school field trip sound?

That’s exactly what students from a small liberal arts college in Virginia came to Nevada to do.

Eleven female students in Randolph College’s Cultural Studies Program visited the Chicken Ranch Brothel Thursday.

They were given a tour of the place and listened to lectures from “working girls” on the business of prostitution.

Students said they enjoyed the trip and that it wasn’t exactly what they were expecting.

“I think I’m going to take away the idea that these women are actually happy at what they’re doing and the cultural idea that these women have been forced to do it isn’t true,” student Alex McKay said. “And these women have other careers and other lives and they’re actually happy here.”

Class instructors say the brothel fit in perfectly with their class discussions about society’s obsession with sex and how women’s bodies are used to sell items and ideas.

These short articles are almost everywhere. Of course, almost no one mentioned that this tour also visited tisited Washington, DC, where they talked to the property manager at Tysons Corner, met with lobbyists who work on higher education and energy issues, visited the Museum of the American Indian, and explored the National Cathedral. But, I’m sure they’re able to take it in stride. It’s publicity.

I just found a humorous NY Times article about “literary deal breakers” in the realm of romance. For bibliophiles, (the author, Rachel Donadio, suggests especially female bibliophiles) a compatible interest in books can let you know if its love, or if its going no where fast. Not the kind of test you’ll see in Cosmo any time soon, but perhaps as effective if not more so.

So, if you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his books. (that’s where it is.)

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 favorite 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.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the 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, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

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 in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “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.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

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. 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!’”

Naming a favorite 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. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

But how much of all this agonizing 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.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”

Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”