Item: 1 copy of Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon

A few months back there was this great feature on one of the Guardian blogs about attracting or being attracted to strangers based on their choice of reading material.  According this article, "a third of those surveyed said that they 'would consider flirting with someone based on their choice of literature.'"  I guess that means that 2/3 wouldn't, but nevertheless, this brings up interesting possibilities.  One of the questions posed at the end of the article was this:  what books do it for you?

So people started chiming in with their preferences, and stories of meetings on trains and in clubs, all because somebody saw somebody else with a certain book. Examples:

Saki's short stories.  Marry this person before the bus or train reaches the next stop.  Wonderful wit, black sense of humour and epicurean lifestyle.  Go for it.

or

I did once tell a dishy guy on the Chicago-EL-train that he was reading the prettiest book in the city that day.  It was red, cloth bound, had a stitched in marker-ribbon and a sailing ship stamped on the front...I asked if it was Moby Dick...Turns out, it was The Count of Monte Cristo, which I liked considerably better.

I love this whole line of inquiry, as well as the stories.  There's a recurring discussion in the comments about The DaVinci Code and why people are so snobby, always having to read highbrow stuff, isn't that kind of pretentious?  As one of the comments said, "I tend to try and avoid even making eye contact with the kind of wretched creature who reads the classics in public. To do otherwise would only encourage them..."  I guess reading something like War and Peace on the subway could be posing, but I think an experienced reader can tell the difference.

I couldn't think of any book, right off hand, that would be enough on its own to compel me to start a conversation with the person reading it.  I mean, I like starting conversations with people about books, because it's a subject where I know what I'm talking about, but it's not because I see the book signifying some sort of soul-mate connection.  Plus, there's a type who's reading something good for the wrong reasons.  You can like a book for totally different reasons than it should be liked.  For example, there's a certain type of guy who reads David Foster Wallace, but a lot of these are just wanna-bes, guys who think they're smarter than everybody else but aren't.  So it's not just what a person is reading; it's also how he's reading it:  how far into the book he is, and what kind of expression he has towards it.

After some thought, though:  if I ever saw a person of the opposite sex reading Blue Highways, and he was more than halfway through it, I probably would be unable to resist asking him about it.

Blue Highways is William Least Heat-Moon's account of driving across the country - actually, sort of around it, but only on small roads, not on interstates or main roads.  In fact, most of my very favorite books are in the man-automobile-road genre, the perfect trifecta of these being the aforementioned Blue Highways, The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck.  I'd be impressed by a guy reading any of these, but Blue Highways is so obscure and the sort of thing that's so easy to misunderstand, that it would mean something slightly different.

Blue Highways is, in a way, the poor relation of the 3.  There's really nothing about it that's glamorous.  Bryson is hilarious and Steinbeck is Steinbeck, but Blue Highways is just one incredibly good book.  Now that I think about it, Bryson and Steinbeck were both happily married at the time of their cross-country drives, but Heat-Moon wasn't.  He was, at the time he took off on his trip, at the end of his marriage and newly unemployed.  He's the loneliest traveler of the 3, and maybe that's why his connections with people seem so much deeper.  Maybe it's that Heat-Moon is part native American, as opposed to the others, and has a different relationship to the land.  Anyway, the point is that Blue Highways is about people and things that most of us drive right on by.  And a guy who could read and appreciate this kind of tenderness would pretty much make me want to talk to him.

I guess this is mostly an academic discussion, since there aren't many guys out there who read anything at all, besides which there is no public transportation here.  All of the best book connections seem to happen on the Tube in London.  I knew there were reasons I could see myself living in England.