I just read this article in the Times about “literary deal-breakers.” At least one of the interviewees made me sick in my mouth:

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

I will say this on public record: James Collins, you are a dickweed, and anyone who likes you deserves you. If we were seven and we were on the playground together, I would throw sand in your face and give you a wedgie. You and your ilk are the reason nobody cares about literary fiction. That’s right, it’s all your fault.

Anyone this judgmental about literature is intellectually incurious, by far too preoccupied with the way others see their class standing to genuinely care about something as banal as literature itself. Guess what? The more you use taste as a wedge to position yourself above others, the more people will hate you. Well, people meaning me, because you couldn’t be more obvious. That’s right, I said dickweed.

Oh, and I’m so sure you totally didn’t sleep with that girl in college because she liked Kundera! Yeah! You’re that discerning! I believe you!