"Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer." --Jane Hirshfield

Monday, June 25, 2012

Girls like Murakami

From The Paris Review: “There’s a difference,” remarked one colleague, “between getting a girl to think you’re smart, and getting a girl to WANT to talk to you. The following are books that will make girls want to talk to you.

—Greatest pick-up book of all time is Just Kids by Patti Smith, because every girl has read it and they ALL want to talk about it.
—Any book ever written by Haruki Murakami
—The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
—White Album by Joan Didion
—What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
—The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. (Don’t question it. Just trust.)”

I was surprised to see Murakami on the list, tho he is one of my favorites. Just Kids, sure -- it *is* fun to talk about. The question was what books would make girls think a guy is hot. Probably, most books, but judging from the last entry, we're talking about college-aged readers or just after. I have no idea what books make women in their 30s and 40s think men are hot. Murakami would still be interesting, but hotness is so variable by then that even Patti Smith might not do it. Denis Johnson? Gustave Flaubert? Neil Gaiman? Margaret Atwood? They all work for me.

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