Literary Speed Dating Meme

I've been tagged!

Well, let's see. It's a good thing Jonathan and I didn't meet this way, because if I were trying to impress him, the books probably would have been Jesus' Son, Imaginary Magnitude, and White Noise (or, for that third one, substitute Infinite Jest or Ficciones).

But I'd want to give these potentials an accurate sense of what they'd be getting. So if we want something that represents me, it would probably have to be something like He, She, and It by Marge Piercy, Song of Solomon, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I don't know, though; I'd also feel tempted to include a book that made a big impression on me in high school: The Awakening, The Age of Innocence, or Native Son.

I wonder, would anyone really want to date those books? I feel like they're so middlebrow. It seems like in order to maximize desirability in a literary speed-dating context, one would choose the cleverest, most difficult, sophisticated, intricate, and complex books possible, like maybe Gravity's Rainbow, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegans Wake. But I guess that's my own self-consciousness (and taste in men!) working there.

Hey, wouldn't it be fun to put together some cheesy literary speed dating clichés? For example, here are a couple of guys I'd probably politely back away from*:

1. On the Road, The Beat Reader, and Erections, Ejaculations and General Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski
2. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, The Tropic of Cancer, and The Story of O

* Not that there's anything wrong with any of these books individually, but combined, they're overkill. I accidentally typed "overkiss" there at first. That would work too.

I'm now tagging everyone who hasn't done this yet.