{"id":548,"date":"2008-04-02T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/02\/literary-dealbreakers\/"},"modified":"2008-04-02T10:27:58","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T18:27:58","slug":"literary-dealbreakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/outreach\/community\/literary-dealbreakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Literary dealbreakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog-images-08\/bookshelf.jpg\" alt=\"bookshelf\" class=\"right\" height=\"192\" width=\"222\" \/>That&#8217;s what Rachel Donadio, in <a href=\"http:\/\/papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com\/2008\/03\/28\/literary-dealbreakers\/\" title=\"donadio on literary dealbreakers\" target=\"_blank\">an article in the New York Times<\/a>, calls this sort of situation: You&#8217;re in the getting-to-know-you stages of a relationship, and you encounter for the first time the other person&#8217;s bookshelf. Could what you see there cause you to break up the relationship then and there? How appalling would the book list have to be?<\/p>\n<p>A shelf full of Any Rand would give me pause. At Donadio&#8217;s blog, readers offer their own nominations, which include such books as <em>The Da Vinci Code<\/em> and <em>The Alchemist <\/em>and such authors as Rand, Tom Peters, and even Umberto Eco.<\/p>\n<p>The premise has something of a Nick Hornbyish <em>High Fidelity <\/em>quality to it. A commenter named Dante remarks on Donadio&#8217;s blog &#8220;Only a completely pretentious jackass would use a book as a measure of someone\u2019s worth.&#8221; But another, with the handle of Oscar Wilde, says that &#8220;Only superficial people don\u2019t judge by appearances.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I suppose that blogs would have deal breakers as well.  What kind of topic would incline you unsubscribe from a bookish blog?<\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>Image (detail) from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/kitta\/\" id=\"contextLink_stream79968372@N00\">Nikita Kashner&#8217;s photostream<\/a><\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s what Rachel Donadio, in an article in the New York Times, calls this sort of situation: You&#8217;re in the getting-to-know-you stages of a relationship, and you encounter&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[20,54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}