BOOKS AND ARTS AUGUST 25, 2010
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My ideal man doesn’t exist. This, at least, is what I had to conclude after visiting alikewise.com, the much-ballyhooed new site for “dating by the book,” which purports to match people based on their taste in literature. Matt Sherman, one of the site’s founders, told the AP that the idea came to him after he broke up with a girlfriend a few years ago. Dreaming about his ideal woman, he imagined her as someone who had read The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s study of randomness and “the highly improbable.” “Books are intimate and personal and revealing,” he said in an interview with Canada’s National Post. “And they are great conversation starters, in the real world and online.” His business partner, Matt Masina, put it a little more graphically. “I had been an avid online dater and there was always that moment of truth when I would be left alone for a few minutes with the person’s bookshelf,” he said. “It would always be scary if the shelf was full of self help and ‘dating’ books. Stuff like He’s Just Not That Into You.”
I was charmed by Sherman’s choice of reading material, because Taleb’s concept of the “black swan” is a perfect metaphor for the serendipity of finding a romantic partner: an “outlier” event, Taleb explains, “outside the realm of regular expectations” that “carries an extreme impact” and becomes explainable only in retrospect. Isn’t that more or less a spot-on description of falling in love? So I headed to the site, hopeful that the highly improbable might happen to me.
Alas. The first writer I put in—W.G. Sebald—turned up no hits at all. “We expanded the search to include other books relating to ‘Sebald,’” the site helpfully informed me, bringing up the profile of a 39-year-old man in New York (good start) seeking a woman between 18 and 48 (I qualify). Unfortunately, my prospective match seemed to have missed the point entirely: his profile lists two books by Michel Houellebecq, about each of which he commented only “It was ok.” My heart beat faster upon seeing his third choice: Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz. A man who reads Polish epics might be a man for me! But it sank again upon reading his comment: “This is an ok read.”
I was hoping for someone a little more articulate. Time to expand the possibilities. I put in Philip Roth, Emily Brontë, Kafka, but the pickings were still slim. A 35-year-old New Yorker is currently reading the new David Mitchell novel and finds The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto “sexy.” Hmm. I was intrigued by a 36-year-old Brooklynite who put up The Annotated Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye (“I wonder how phonies feel when they read this book”) until I saw that he also likes Women Who Run With the Wolves. Clicking on Salinger led me to a different guy with some decent choices, including Orhan Pamuk, The Black Dahlia, and Herodotus. Unfortunately, he lives in Australia.
We know that people don’t necessarily present themselves in the most honest light in their online-dating profiles. Still, the majority of the virtual bookshelves fall into two categories: mind-numbingly conventional or bewilderingly schizophrenic. I learned, not to my surprise, that hipsters all over the country read Murakami, Kundera (the site offers no statistics, but in my unscientific perusal The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed to pop up more often than any other book), and García Márquez. On the other side of the spectrum, a search for Elie Wiesel led me to a woman who lists Night and Survival in Auschwitz together with Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Devil Wears Prada. But she put up Wislawa Szymborska, too, so I’m willing to forgive her. (Note to the guy in Brooklyn who likes Szymborska as well as Clarice Lispector, Graham Greene, and Bolaño: I can teach you how to pronounce her name.)
I sympathize with Sherman’s desire to find a mate who has also read his favorite book. If one reason we read, as Jonathan Franzen has said, is to insert ourselves into a larger community of writers and readers, then naturally we want the person we love to join us there. The writers with whom we identify most deeply can come to feel like extensions of ourselves: if my beloved doesn’t like my favorite book, isn’t he also rejecting me? Conversely, could I love a man who doesn’t love The Emigrants, or Anna Karenina, or any of the other books that have influenced most deeply the way I understand the world?
But there’s also something narcissistic about choosing a partner based on the congruency of his or her tastes with one’s own. In an essay that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this year, Cathleen Schine wrote poignantly about her exhilaration when, newly married and sensitive to the gaps in her reading history, she realized that her husband’s bookcase was hers for the taking. “It reached from one wall to the other, from floor to ceiling. It had been culled and collected by a person of knowledge and taste, a product of Columbia’s core curriculum, and ... it was arranged alphabetically. I started at the upper left hand corner (Jane Austen! J. R. Ackerley!) and worked my way to the lower right (Waugh! Wodehouse! Woolf!).” When they split up, Schine continues, and she found a different partner, “there waiting for me was a new bookcase full of other books.” Much of the joy in new love comes from the excitement of mutual discovery, of opening one’s mind to another person who opens his or her own in turn. A subject that never interested us before is suddenly fascinating, because the beloved is obsessed with it; and explaining our own obsessions to another person can help illuminate them all over again.
So if Matt Sherman doesn’t find his Black Swan-reading mate (the only woman who lists it on her profile lives in Canada), I suggest that he expand his search to include other books related to it: like Black Swan Green, David Mitchell’s novel about a bookish adolescent boy with a stutter growing up in 1980s England. I liked it; and so did Janet in Toronto, a fortyish book blogger with a chocolate lab. Maybe he should read it—and then drop her a line.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor of The New Republic.
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21 comments
It's tough to sympathize with someone who dismisses potential partners for not enjoying Polish epics correctly. Franklin offers good advice at the end, but perhaps this physician should heal herself.
- Simon Greenwood
August 25, 2010 at 12:23am
I'm reminded of my first wife. Finally, it didn't work out. There's only so much interest you can have in a gorgeous, olive skinned woman who can model bikinis and sunglasses. I then married a stolid, solid woman with a mustache, who, like a fullback, had a very low center of gravity, and was hard to tackle. She could model nothing, but had read all the works of Bronislaw Pruz., You just can't find women like that very often. Lucky I am!
- basman
August 25, 2010 at 12:48am
I think reading comes between people.
- ironyroad
August 25, 2010 at 1:13am
Ruth, I am looking forward to reading Michel Houellebecq. My wife read a couple of his books and thought they were terrific. I also think that W. G. Sebald was a great writer. I recommend “Austerlitz” whenever I get a chance. However anyone who likes to discuss Henryk Sienkiewicz is not someone I would want to have coffee with much less date; for Polish literature I prefer discussing Witold Marian Gombrowicz’ Ferdydurke, or Pornografia. I say this in sorrow, dear Ruth, because I think you are an excellent critic whose review of Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise was a fine piece of writing.
- jdyer
August 25, 2010 at 1:36am
I guess my path is different than basman's. my wife reads very different stuff than I do- our only common literary overlap is Punisher graphic novels.
- miceelf
August 25, 2010 at 7:36am
And let's don't be so down on "schizophrenic" taste in literature. After hearing I'd read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, an attractive Objectivist girl assumed that meant I was as deeply passionate about Objectivism (or at least philosophy) as she was, and we began a stormy affair that ended badly for both of us. My personal bookshelf is filled with Shakespeare, Lattimore's translations of Homer, Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Barry, Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, and dozens of other tidbits - but little, alas, one could call philosophy. To sample widely is not necessarily to be indiscriminate: different genres serve different purposes. For me, a heavy meal of Tolstoy or Cormac McCarthy is much more satisfying after an aperitif of Robert Asprin or Elmore Leonard. True, the whole can look a bit schizophrenic. But my erstwhile paramour's bookshelf, in contrast, was Rand, Rand and commentaries on Rand. Which of us, dear reader, had the problem?
- austinexpat
August 25, 2010 at 8:29am
austinexpat, some of my favorite authors were schizophrenic. (not your fault, of course, and Franklin is in good company, but my pet peeve is the misuse of the term schizophrenic- it doesn't actually refer to split personality, but rather to good old fasioned dementia precox.)
- miceelf
August 25, 2010 at 8:46am
Funny. At the moment I'm reading Philip Roth's 'The Human Stain', a novel that features a passionate affair between a hyperarticulate retired classics professor and a cleaning woman who is illiterate, literally illiterate. The idea that one's lover must love the same books as you is, of course, ridiculous. My own marriage--which I would characterize as suitably passionate and loving--provides a strong counterexample. Without tooting my own horn, allow me to assert that I am a serious reader. Counting audiobooks, I read a book every couple of weeks, mostly works of serious fiction either contemporary or classic. My wife, not so much. She's smart as a whip but likes to say that she received "no general education." She went to a Jewish day school in Melbourne, Australia--the largest such school in the world--where literature was defined by the Torah and Chaim Potok's 'The Chosen', and then at eighteen enrolled directly in medical school as it is done down here and never really developed much of a reading habit. It helps, I suppose, that we're both specialists in the same medical discipline, so even though we don't rub noses over 'The Emperor's Children' we can swap stories about patients with liver abscesses and fungal endocarditis. Finally though, it seems to me that books and reading is a highly individual passion. Reading is a solitary, not a shared experience. (Is there anything more boring than listening to another person recount the plot of the novel they're reading?) It's hard for me to imagine how liking the same book accounts for anything but the most trivial commonality. How much more important it is that your lover laugh at your jokes or that she can make you howl like a wolf in bed.
- AaronW
August 25, 2010 at 11:05am
I'm reminded of my first wife too. She's still my first wife. She loves fiction. I won't read anything but nonfiction because life is short. It was hate at first sight. You know how these things go. It'll be 30 years next spring:)
- Mikelawyr22
August 25, 2010 at 11:07am
Er, Basman, do you happen to know if the gorgeous olive skinned woman is still available?
- robertgorton
August 25, 2010 at 11:31am
Your comment is exquisite, jackson. My wife, Sheena, and I (we have been married nearly a year-and-a-half) intersect on the plane of reading at various places. We have both read Freakonomics and The Economic Naturalist. We have read some of the same fiction pieces in The New Yorker and Commentary. She read Censoring An Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour from beginning to end and loved it. I meant to read it after her last year but I didn't get to it. She will sometimes read TNR threads and my comments and those of others. We have great discussions about everything. I feel very fortunate that we vector together the way we do, given that Sheena is over a third of a century younger than me. I just finished a superb book, Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us - And How To Know When Not To Trust Them by David H. Freedman. We had a great dinner discussion about this book the other evening and now Sheena wants to read it. Freedman talks about double-blind studies and randomized controlled trials and my wife is familiar with these practices, so I was able to discourse on the book and she followed me all the way along. My wife is attractive and loving and intellectual, so I am supremely lucky. I am with you basman. Three cheers for wonderful wives.
- liberal reformer
August 25, 2010 at 12:00pm
What about magazines? I'd be delighted to meet other New Republic readers, besides in these article comments. Where are you people? :-)
- MICRM
August 25, 2010 at 8:35pm
Well, MICRM, I reside in Seattle, Et tu?
- liberal reformer
August 25, 2010 at 8:38pm
...Well, MICRM, I reside in Seattle, Et tu?... My wife has some close family in Seattle.
- basman
August 26, 2010 at 12:10am
Perhaps TNR should start a personals site?
- deelowknee
August 26, 2010 at 3:17pm
Every night before we go to sleep, I read to my wife.
- skahn
August 26, 2010 at 10:46pm
Well, basman, when you visit Seattle the next time you must come by. Sheena and I would love to have you and your wife over for dinner.
- liberal reformer
August 27, 2010 at 8:10pm
I'll let you know.
- basman
August 28, 2010 at 5:01pm
Glad to see both Ms. Franklin and jdyer name-drop Sebald and Houellebecq. I too always suggest Austerlitz / The Elementary Particles to friends and co-workers-- to the point of buying them copies. I'd overlook many flaws to be with a woman who could appreciate either.
- Sancho
August 30, 2010 at 4:24am
What a remarkable thread this is, an encomium to the reading thinking woman! So much is this quality valued that these putative Darcies who comment here that they are magnanimously willing to overlook "many flaws" and settle for a less physically attractive mate! Oh, the exceptional generosity of it, the open-mindedness, the self-sacrifice, the great affection and appreciation! ____________________ "Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,'' said Darcy, ``has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse, or covering a skreen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.''... ``Then,'' observed Elizabeth, ``you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished women.'' ``Yes; I do comprehend a great deal in it.'' ``Oh! certainly,'' cried his faithful assistant, ``no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.'' ``All this she must possess,'' added Darcy, ``and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.'' ``I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.'' ``Are you so severe upon your own sex, as to doubt the possibility of all this?'' ``I never saw such a woman, I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united.''
- noga1
August 30, 2010 at 8:40am
the humorless noga1 overlooks a bit of tongue-in-cheek. what a bore.
- Sancho
August 30, 2010 at 5:22pm