Penguin + match.com = true love (or at least a quick hookup)

Sick of being set up with illiterates? If you're in the UK, you're in luck. Penguin and match.com have joined forces there to create penguindating.co.uk, a service that brings book lovers together. That way you never have to date someone who obsesses over Christopher Hitchens, unless of course you really want to.

The deal is, you write about the last book you read as part of your profile and use match.com's "matchwords" to find possible dates who like the same writers.

If you're in the U.S., alas, you must just hope all that stuff about height and weight and interests and income is true.

Comments

[bibliophile]

This is so interesting! If I weren't already happily married I'd try it. My husband and I have started the marital book club -- sounds racier than it is, since we've read Edward Jones' "The Known World," Jared Bernstein's "Crunch" and Brian McLaren's "Everything Must Change," so far. I wonder if people lie about books the way they lie about their age.

[Connie]

OK, this is hilarious: I tried to respond to this by saying people would lie about reading a certain Herman Melville book about a white whale, and the fascist decency protector won't let me REFER TO THE BOOK BY TITLE because it is flagging it. For GOD'S sake. We let the small minded racist cretins over on the innocuous Palin thread write whatever, but I can't type the title of one of the most famous books EVER? As Ahab might say, that blows.

[Bibliophile]

Just for the record, that Melville book was not part of the marital book club. Make of that what you will. And if I were on that bibliophile dating service, I wonder what I'd think about someone who listed that on their "books read" list. If it were a man, would he think it was a subliminal way of bragging about his attributes? Or would he be a genuinely well-read person? I could see an entire chick-lit novel based on this premise! Wasn't there a movie or a book or something where one of the male characters left copies of Pride and Prejudice around his dwelling to attract women, even though he'd never read it?

And, re: censorship -- reports have it that Sarah Palin asked a librarian in Alaska how to go about banning books in her hometown library ...