The Literary Dating Scene on Alikewise.com

The New Republic checks it out.

From the story...

Alas. The first writer I put in—W.G. Sebald—turned up no hits at all. “We expanded the search to include other books relating to ‘Sebald,’” the site helpfully informed me, bringing up the profile of a 39-year-old man in New York (good start) seeking a woman between 18 and 48 (I qualify). Unfortunately, my prospective match seemed to have missed the point entirely: his profile lists two books by Michel Houellebecq, about each of which he commented only “It was ok.” My heart beat faster upon seeing his third choice: Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz. A man who reads Polish epics might be a man for me! But it sank again upon reading his comment: “This is an ok read.”

I was hoping for someone a little more articulate. Time to expand the possibilities. I put in Philip Roth, Emily Brontë, Kafka, but the pickings were still slim. A 35-year-old New Yorker is currently reading the new David Mitchell novel and finds The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto “sexy.” Hmm. I was intrigued by a 36-year-old Brooklynite who put up The Annotated Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye (“I wonder how phonies feel when they read this book”) until I saw that he also likes Women Who Run With the Wolves. Clicking on Salinger led me to a different guy with some decent choices, including Orhan Pamuk, The Black Dahlia, and Herodotus. Unfortunately, he lives in Australia.

We know that people don’t necessarily present themselves in the most honest light in their online-dating profiles. Still, the majority of the virtual bookshelves fall into two categories: mind-numbingly conventional or bewilderingly schizophrenic. I learned, not to my surprise, that hipsters all over the country read Murakami, Kundera (the site offers no statistics, but in my unscientific perusal The Unbearable Lightness of Being seemed to pop up more often than any other book), and García Márquez. On the other side of the spectrum, a search for Elie Wiesel led me to a woman who lists Night and Survival in Auschwitz together with Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Devil Wears Prada. But she put up Wislawa Szymborska, too, so I’m willing to forgive her. (Note to the guy in Brooklyn who likes Szymborska as well as Clarice Lispector, Graham Greene, and Bolaño: I can teach you how to pronounce her name.)