Readers by Author, Jia’s Version

Lauren Leto stereotyped readers by their favorite author in a lovely list on her blog, and it’s about as snarky and judgmental as such a list should be, but I still found myself thinking: too nice. So I am ripping it off for my 100th post. The four categories are: “Eww,” “You Don’t Really Read,” “Okay I Get That You Read But You Have To Stop Talking About That One Book,” and “Hey, Come Here Often?”

Eww.

(Let me say, while most of the books on this list are girly books, here’s the thing. At least stupid girls read! )

Stephenie Meyer: Horny Christian housewives (or future ones) who get French pedicures.

Jodi Picoult: Ladies who scrapbook and/or find the high school party scenes in Law & Order: SVU mildly titillating.

Lauren Weisberger: Girls who either secretly or openly like the idea of marrying for money (which corroborates Leto’s statement, “Girls who can’t read. Or think.”)

Ayn Rand: Selfish people.

Nicholas Sparks: Ladies who peaked in high school, or never peaked at all.

James Patterson: Tired people with unsatisfying jobs.

John Grisham: People who are confused and John Grisham was kind of the first thing handy.

The Bitches that Wrote Skinny Bitch: Girls who try to “forget to eat” but always end up downing quarts of ice cream at 3 AM.

Whoever Wrote Redeeming Love: Girls who would throw away their birth control if their boyfriend wasn’t making enough progress, nahmean?

J.R.R. Tolkien: People who have at least contemplated cybersex if not initiated it–nightly.

You Don’t Really Read.

(Divided into the “At Least You Read Your Required Reading,” and “At Least You Tried” categories.)

At Least You Read Your Required Reading:

Edgar Allen Poe: Middle-schoolers who are about to graduate to reading erotic bondage fiction online.

Mark Twain/Ralph Waldo Emerson: Men who harbor elaborate woodsman fantasies but never consider career options outside of business.

Harper Lee: Yeah, To Kill A Mockingbird is a great book, isn’t it. You could’ve been a reader, why did you lose steam?

George Orwell: People who stay up late watching creepy things on A&E.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: People who are either really rich or really really want to be.

J.D. Salinger: Boys who wish they went to boarding school so they’d have more space for their angst.

Emily Dickinson: Girls who use decade-old makeup and wish consumption was still a viable disease.

Allen Ginsberg: People who actually never even made it through all of “Howl.”

At Least You Tried:

Dan Brown: People underexposed to books.

Chuck Klosterman: People underexposed to thought.

Chuck Palahniuk: People with rape fantasies (which corroborates Leto’s statement, “Boys who can’t read.”)

C.S. Lewis: Christcore hipsters who would be atheists if they hadn’t been born in the South.

Philippa Gregory: Sexually unsatisfied pale girls who secretly want to put on a wench costume.

Emily Giffin: Women who work really hard but wish it was still the fifties.

James Frey: People who try to read the news and then get bored and start texting.

Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael: Well-meaning people with greasy, greasy hair.

Okay I Get That You Read But You Have To Stop Talking About That One Book

Jack Kerouac: People who like the idea of camping but not camping.

Jonathan Safran Foer: The people who take all the outlets at coffee shops.

Paulo Coelho: People who sometimes contemplate one idea for an entire afternoon and then wake up and are like, “Wait, is Chipotle still open?”

Nicole Krauss: Nice mousy people who lack gaydar.

Dave Eggers: People who at one point thought about joining the Peace Corps but then went to see a jam band and forgot.

Jane Austen: Girls who would always rather cuddle than have sex.

Kurt Vonnegut: People who look on Wikiquote a lot in search of something that really really defines them.

Michael Pollan: Self-righteous anorexic vegetarians, or rich people who like doing things halfway.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Ladies who don’t understand their tax forms and want to marry older, kind of dirty men.

Bret Easton Ellis: People who have had a higher-than-average amount of experiences with whiskey dick.

Hey, Come Here Often?

(This category is Janus-faced, if you will. I do not appreciate it when people start Anna Karenina or Finnegan’s Wake, instantly collapse from exhaustion, and then claim Tolstoy or Joyce as their favorite author all the livelong day. People who truly love these authors often can’t stand to talk about it because they love them so much. And I like that.)

J.K. Rowling: Mostly Gryffindors. Some Ravenclaws, the occasional Slytherin. No Hufflepuffs.

Cormac McCarthy: Guys who have been clinically depressed and girls who have orgasmed on accident.

Margaret Atwood: Girls who date guys with delicate bones.

Leo Tolstoy: Awesome people who don’t get out enough but feel like they do because they think so much.

Philip Roth: Men who could successfully maintain a string of extramarital affairs.

Ernest Hemingway: Non-needy people that date super-needy people.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: People who are born ethical and don’t really know what to do about it.

James Joyce: People who have lots of vaguely ecstatic, sublime moments while they’re traveling but end up overly fond of alone time.

Jorge Luis Borges: Smart people with good spatial reasoning that wouldn’t feel bad about jacking off while a family member was in the room.

John Cheever: Alcoholics.

Raymond Carver: Alcoholic stoners.

Haruki Murakami: People who are good at keeping secrets.

Sherwood Anderson: Want to get married? I’m serious.