Book Couples

I could be as busy as can be at work all week, but nothing is allowed to get in the way of the morning reading ritual I share with my husband on the weekends. We look forward to it immensely as a guaranteed time we spend with one another; a slow and relaxing pause in our hectic lives. The books change along with our habits, but not the fact of the books themselves.

Nowadays, I’m ripping through volumes related to innovation, creativity, marketing, leadership, etc. to help with my new job. For my darling, it is language. Yesterday I finished James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, which is about the combined intelligence of individuals acting in a group, in the way that, say, wikis demonstrate. I lump this title along with the Tipping Point and Freakonomics in terms of interest and likeability.

This morning it was Seth Godin’s Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, which is a marketing text of sorts about creating remarkable products. The bus book of the week was a wholly unrelated French volume of short stories by a local writer named Marie Hélene Poitras called La Mort de Mignonne et autres histoires.

I can’t tell you how important it is to me that my husband reads. If you are a Reader, books can make or break your couple. When I was doing my undergrad degree and amassing books at a frantic pace, this boy in my class expressed interest in me. When he told me how proud he was that he had kept not one single book in his apartment, I lifted my jaw back into place and then got out of there as fast as possible. A skunk may as well have sprayed me.

To bibliophiles, other people’s reading can be aphrodisiacal. Nothing is more attractive than finding out about a prospective mate’s passion for books, particularly if you share similar taste. I know of a couple who just started dating who are positively excited about each other’s bookish habits. They talk about that quality more than anything else in reference to the other. It’s actually much more meaningful than it at first appears. What it translates to is: he’s intelligent; she’s interesting; he’s like me; we have a lot to talk about; we can spend time reading together; we have similar values; we like to learn; we appreciate the same things, and on and on. It’s a solid foundation upon which to build. They will never run out of things to say.

Book couples are kindred souls. There’s nothing more to it.

Comments

[Sylvia Forester]

Sounds like a great idea for an introduction service. You show me your Library Thing and I'll show you mine. ;)