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] |  

Hell to the yes. "Fine Lines," the newish Friday feature at ultimate lady-blog Jezebel just keeps getting more and more delish. The past fortnight showcased two of our especial YA favorites: The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger and Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Read them both, then come back to us, if you choose. YA-Rant Alert!


We own almost every single Danziger book. We bought most of them used at garage sales or from that Scholastic book-buying catalog thing they always had once a month at our school (which furnished most of our youthful library! when the books came it was like nerd holiday and birthday all in one!). Cat is probably our pet Danzinger tale, mostly because it's written about an outcast from the perspective of said outcast, it never gets overly precious, it's raw and honest and lonely and real, and shit, Marcy is a total card! What a hidden firecracker!

So yes, we adored her in Cat, but then suddenly we found ourselves SERIOUSLY DISAPPOINTED in Danziger for turning Marcy's whole life story around in an unpleasantly cliched manner. The sequel novel about our girl, There's a Bat in Bunk Five, catches us up to Marcy about a year later: she's lost a ton of weight, is suddenly pretty (no more awkward adolescence at 15? how nice for her!), and scores one of the cutest, wittiest, guitar-playing dudes at the artsy fartsy camp Ms. Finney and her hot, bearded husband run instead of teaching English to ungrateful public school kids. Phew. It's like -- what gives? One of the things that was so wonderful about Cat is that at the end, everything doesn't turn out to be 100%! And that's cool! Because newsflash! Not every social wallflower BLOSSOMS LIKE A LOVELY DELICATE FLOWER in two seconds after their phsycial appearance changes for the better. Duh! It's just upsetting. We felt as though something was STOLEN FROM OUR HEARTS after we read Bat. The worst part? Yes, we were jealous of Marcy! When we were supposed to be relating to her! What happened?!


On the other hand, The Witch of Blackbird Pond always satisfied and freaked us out to the nines every time we read and read and reread it in middle school. So delicious! Such a perfect teen precursor to our beloved Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, the sort of haunting romantical coming-of-age mystery creep-fest that makes life worth living! Kit, dear, headstrong Kit, is flawed -- and yet -- she's all fierceness and fabulosity. Old Hag has her totally figured out: she screws up, but we can't help but love her to pieces by the end. Plus, the Purtians! Connecticut colonial wilderness! Crippled Mercy and her big blue eyes! Boys in breeches! Sharp-tongued Nat! CONSIDERING the idea of marrying simply to get out of doing back-breaking housework! Oh, god. Where, oh where, is that Scholastic book catalog when we need it? Or a used bookstore? Or a library? We want tea and old books, now, forever, yesterday.

2/26/2008 4:02:48 PM by Sharon | Comments [4] |  

Since nobody is reading anything anymore except text-messages and blogs, then we guess it shouldn't matter which books make you smart and which make you dumb, at least according to this guy (link via Blog of a Bookslut). We prefer literature to statistics. After puzzling over this chart for a very long ten minutes, we still don't fully understand it or this list, which is supposed to explain the graph. Back to our lunchtime sandwich companion reading, currently Love in a Time of Cholera. We delight in it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez never fails to satisfy.

1/29/2008 3:12:39 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |  

From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, here's David Oshinsky's great essay about Knopf's biggest (and most regretable) rejections.

See for yourself.

9/11/2007 3:45:35 PM by Sharon | Comments [0] |