Love Between the Shelves

My dear friend Catherine sent me the article It's not you, it's your books from The New York Times website. Author Rachel Donadio writes:

"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."

This week between my blog and Paul's blog there has been much discussion about books - the good, the popular, the intelligent, the bad, the most read and the least read - oh and then there was shelfari thrown into the mix just to make it really interesting. I would seem a rather unlikely way to put the spark back in a relationship - but well - Dave and I both love books, we both love each other - it would make sense ... well wouldn't it?

We started having conversations again - meaningful conversations about books. With all the other more interesting things to discuss and debate when we were initially falling in love, books probably didn't get a see in. Dave started shelving his reads on Shelfari, I began compiling my 'must read - no seriously this time' list. He started telling me about Anna Karenin (which he is currently reading) and I began to share short story ideas. Everyone started to smile and joke again ... and Dylan's rather irratic behaviour became more bareable.

It's not that we had stopped talking to each other prior to this week - it's simply that when you have a child, when you lead busy lives, you can stop having meaningful discussion because its almost impossible to have one uninterupted or you're tired.

I remember that when I met Dave I was impressed that he was a voracious reader (my ex partner never read and my love of reading was a constant source of tension until basically I gave up reading all together) Dave read lots of 'interesting' books - the sort of titles that you'd find on a university literature course reading list. If studying a Masters in Enviromental Geochemistry didn't give me an indication as to his curiosity and intellect - his reading did.

He was reading Satre at the time we met. I was reading a book about the lives of the Bronte sisters and a conspiracy theory surrounding the deaths of the Bronte children and Charlottes marriage to AB Nicholls (I for the life of me cannot remember or find the title now.) I had been struggling with reading - finding that after the hours of reading text books and scientific papers - reading for pleasure put me to sleep (that's the degree in which I exhausted myself with my studies) And until recently - I haven't been an avid reader like I used to be.

Considering past relationships - I don't really think that literature really played that big a deal in deciding compatibility, with perhaps one noticeable exception. I dated a pilot before I met Dave (aptly named 'The Princess by my bestfriends!) When we met he raved about The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and encouraged me wholeheartedly to read it. I was working as a waitress at the time and returning back to Albury after a trip away with him, I got a reasonable sized tip. I took the money down to the local bookstore and bought The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and devoured it. At the end I was left a little confused - because I just didn't get it - all the hype from The Princess I had expected something earth shattering, and it wasn't. Obviously I'd missed the point. And that was probably it. We didn't break up because I didn't like The Way of the Peaceful Warrior or find it life changing - we broke up because hype doesn't last (the literary and romantic type!)

With Dave, the books came later ... because the first thing that struck me was not what was (or wasn't) on his beside table ... but what was in his wardrobe (isn't that where all the best skeletons hang out?) The door was slightly open and I couldn't help but glance in as I went to the loo. There were a pair of Tigger slippers in there. That probably said far more, at the time, about him than the Satre on his bedside table - had I bothered to look.

In retrospect - I was more likely to have been left by the wayside by Dave for my 'bogan taste in music' - rather than an incompatibility in literature. We both read and enjoyed it, that seemed enough. Thankfully most things in life are malleable. Both our tastes in music have become more accomodating and gratefully, due to Dave's love of classical literature my own reading horizons are expanding.

Which begs the question - have you ever broken off a relationship over literary incompatibility or is it, as the New York Times article suggests, just symbolic of a larger problem or schism? Or does it really matter at all? To read or not to read - that is the question ....