Steve and I have a huge collection of books. So large, in fact, that our five bookshelves don’t hold it. Books litter all of the horizontal surfaces of our house, and this is AFTER we had a garage sale (I hate those things) and practically gave away all of the books that we weren’t ever planning to read again. It also doesn’t include the two shelves of books in the boys’ rooms. My criteria for getting rid of a book was whether I could remember any of the plot details without looking at the synopsis on the back or inside cover. If the answer was no (hello Oprah’s Vanilla-Flavored Plots Book Club) then the book went into the get-rid-of-it pile.
It recently occurred to me that the reason that we have so many books is that Steve and I have completely different taste in books. While I love books that are heavy on plot, Steve is much more into books that engage in a lot of what I refer to as navel-gazing. I recently read Ian McEwan’s ,A Child In Time, and while I enjoyed it, I found my self mentally fast-forwarding through a lot of parts in which the main character embarks upon esoteric mental journeys into some perhaps imagined past. “Whatever.”, I thought, “Just tell me what happens next. Does he find his daughter?” Steve loves Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. He is as much enchanted by the linguistic style, as he is by the story. I loved The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. Steve recently picked it up, and as much as he wanted to love it, just didn’t. If we had a more similar taste in books, I’m guessing our book cases would be less stuffed.
I think our reading styles are reflected in our speaking styles. When I tell as story, I leave out extraneous and sometime even necessary detail, and stick to the meat of the point I’m trying to get across. Steve’s speaking style is a tad more, (erm….) loquacious. When he tells a story, no detail is left untold, and he has yet to meet a subreference (or even sub subreference) that he didn’t feel would enhance his story by its in-depth exploration. If speaking style does in fact reflect reading style, I wonder how never reading for pleasure, as is fairly common in our television oriented society, is reflected in speech?
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