A Slight Delay

An  essay worth reading in this week’s New York Times Book Review by Rachel Donadio. In brief, she writes about how people’s literary tastes can be a deal-breaker when it comes to romance. She writes:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. 

It reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: A Novel (okay, not that long ago… I read the book about once a year. It’s just one of those things). Rob Fleming, the book’s main character, says at one point: “[T]he truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” (more…)