Did you read Rachel Donadio's NYBR back-page essay about literary dealbreakers yet? Or her subsquent Paper Cuts blog post, in which she asked Times readers to state their own literary dealbreakers?

So, what are the most common literary dealbreakers? People who don't read at all, people who love Ayn Rand, people who dote on Harry Potter, people who worship The Da Vinci Code, people who are too pretentious, and people who aren't pretentious enough.

This is one of the best Paper Cuts comment so far (the prose is a bit rough, the ideas are good):

People who reject others for reading a particular book have either:

1) read the book themselves to merit their rejection of its content, in which case they are hyppocrites [sic] for dumping other readers of the same book
2) demonstrated dishonesty and sterotype [sic] by dumping someone based on a book they have never read themselves and of which they cannot, with integrity, state what they object about it.
— Posted by Student

Most of the blog commenters and people quoted in the piece are guilty of both of these points. Donadio is very wise for not coming out and stating her own dealbreakers. She's absolved. Lucky her.

For as long as we can remember worrying about whether were cool, "worthwhile", popular, whatever -- we knew that we would often be judged as such (or not) based on the things we liked. What we read. The music we listened to. The art we admired. Our tastes, the things we enjoy -- now, especially -- define who we are. You don't need to get to know a person in order to peg them based on their Facebook profile, to decide that the last book they posted on their iRead application was way, way below your standards of snobbery, or that they're "A Fan" of a band you outgrew five years before hipster became a New York magazine cover story. It seems that these days, few people can afford to be genuine -- if they want to adequately compete.

It's sad.

If we're honest about what we truly love, and what we truly value -- whether it's a short story by Chekov or a poem by Jewel -- compatability tends to follow suit. And then, if you want to go ahead and judge people for being happy enough to have found each other based on their alleged crappy-ass taste in blogs, well -- that's your perogative, we say! And we say it with a smile.

Instead of inviting you to comment on your literary dealbreakers (snore), if you would like to, please post either the last five books/magazines/comics/whatevs you read (no cheating, even if one of those books was really embarrassing) or a book that you adore that you get a lot of flack about from other people. You don't have to defend it, although you can, if you want to. What's more important is the fact that you like it, regardless of whether anyone else does. If it made you think or feel something, good or bad or in between, we want to know about it.

3/31/2008 12:40:57 PM by Sharon | Comments [2] |  

We love the Interweb! (Except when it tries to break our blog.)

But you know what we don't love? E-books. E-books are gross. It's like, we and nearly everyone else we know with day jobs spend hours upon hours staring at a screen and reading the Internet all day long. Everyone reads a different Internet. We like to read about literary gossip (um, duh), regular gossip, music, criticism, musical criticism, literary criticism, clothes, media, and more assorted esoteric shit. But you know what we don't like to read on screens? BOOKS. Excerpts are fine. Reviews are fine. Author interviews, again, fine.

NOT books.

Not our beloved Pride & Prejudice.

Reading a Pride & Prejudice e-book is like watching the Kiera Knightly/Colin Firth superfilm, which was NOT SUPER. It's fake! It's bad and wrong! Um, we prefer the BBC version. Obviously! That, friends, THAT, could never be as good -- nothing could ever be, really, let's be honest -- as the book, but it's close! Oh, it is close!

We know e-books must make things a million times easier for people like, say, editors. They can load up all their manuscripts into the thing and just carry that around, instead of a thousand pound canvas bag (we've seen it happen). And we know e-books also have other, added, educational, environmental, and otherwise extremely practical purposes. We just don't care to think of them.

Because. Well. We hate them! We never want to read a book that way! Especially not anything by Jane Austen. No, no, no. We reject these technological developments. We prefer to read novels in an "antiquated" manner. Fuck e-books. We're just saying.

3/20/2008 10:18:54 AM by Sharon | Comments [1] |  

Kelefa Sanneh, our favorite New York Times pop music critic, is going to be a staff writer at The New Yorker! Now he and the S.F.J. can totally duke it out over the Lil' Mama and Britney coverage. Loving it! Also moving to 4 Times Square is New York magazine writer Ariel Levy, of whose work we are also big fans.

Margaret B. Jones's (not her real name!) Love and Consequences, a memoir about coming-of-age as a penniless, abused foster child in the L.A. gang the Bloods was -- wait for it -- a big, fat lie. Girl got Michiko Kakutani creaming over her writing last week, and she's a stone-faced bullshit artist. Oh, the many ways in which she could have handled this differently. Peggy, did you ever think about writing a non-fiction book based on your friends' accounts, instead of, we don't know, passing them off as your own?!

Remember when we freaked out over that Sloane Crosley profile in the NY Observer? The Most Popular Publicist in the World is back, and her new book is about to come out. The hype machine is nearly short-circuiting itself over her tome? You don't say! We're still really, really excited to read it, though. This is the first personal essay Sloane published, in the Village Voice, and it's very funny and good, so we guess the blurbers are all right. We like her. We can't help it. Please let her survive this ugly process of the build-up and the backlash.

3/4/2008 11:02:07 AM by Sharon | Comments [2] |  

The Washington Post has a story on the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Oh, those sweet-talking Brits:

Doris Lessing was out grocery shopping near her home in London yesterday when the Swedish Academy announced she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She returned from the store to find a media circus, the wire services reported.

"Oh Christ!" she said, when told about the monumental honor. "I couldn't care less."

10/12/2007 12:26:33 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

Too bad Chris Crocker and his not-fake crying and serious glitter eyeshadow didn't bother You Tubing a video about leaving poor James Frey alone a year ago. Oh well - just watch this and replace "Britney" with "James." So yeah, we thought we were over it but we're not. This week the Observer weighs in on Frey-gate and we can't turn away.

Argh. It'll be a cold day in hell before we read another drug memoir.

9/19/2007 4:46:16 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

It's NOT okay.

We're really grouchy now. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution has fired longtime book editor Teresa Weaver and threatens to eliminate its book review section completely. Demoralizing beyond words? You bet. Sign a petition to protest the AJC's dim-witted move here. The Critical Mass blog has more on the subject.

 

4/24/2007 10:55:15 AM by Sharon | Comments [0] |