Sunday Book Review
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?em&ex=1206849600&en=1267bc8ef7ee82c2&ei=5087%0A
Essay
It’s Not You, It’s Your Books
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 30, 2008
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!”
Peter Arkle
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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.”
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Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.