The Flirtatious Reader, by Odwar Dergey

(14:24:31 CDT)

The Flirtatious Reader, by Odwar Dergey

My eyes, to put it bluntly, are tired of being in-doors but I am craving a chance to sit down and read, so me and my laptop is about to go find a shady spot and waste an hour or two. This brings me back to a complaint I once read: how do you flirt-read with an ebook reader? For those who don't flirt-read, or even get what I am talking about, flirt-reading (I'm sure there are better words for it, something like "Reading-for-Sexual-Attention") is when you bust out a nice book, nice meaning something that suggests you are strong but emotional, stable but willing to dig deeper into the nuances of the soul, and go down to the park or the coffee shop and read it with the cover of the book held up just a little. The concept goes that someone of the opposite sex, a person who is just in love with the book in your hand, will sit down and strike up a coversation. Of course, this is wrought with flaws. Do you really want the kind of mate that interrupts your reading time? Is it better to use a book you really like versus one that will be liked by the kind of person you like (answer: who knows?)? Should you go for the slightly harder to pocket hardcover, with it's greater and therefore easier to notice surface cover, or should you go for the often brighter and easier to carry, but smaller, trade paperback (note: massmarkets should only be used if you want to attact a flea market shopper!)?

And, the biggest flaw of them all, now that more and more people are reading on their laptops and their Kindles and their Mega-Screen Bookmans, how do you flirt with that? At best, you might get someone saying "Oh, you have a Kindle!" before they spit in your face and tell you they don't like the smell of a Kindle. Maybe there should be little printouts that you can make a "tent" out of and then you put that in front of you: "my Macbook is currently showing me the book 97 ways to be spectacular in bed, as suggested by the works of the Bronte Sisters, do inquire". The flipside is that I can now read trash out in public and then have a much better book queued up for hotkeying over when a redheaded hotkey, so to speak, alt-tabs over my way. "...triple breasted whore of Eroti...*keys over* It is a truth, universally acknowledged..." *looks up with a single tear in the eye* "So true...so true...".

Yes, I am a married man. No, I am not actually using books to flirt (have you seen what I read? Any woman who reads a significant amount of the horror, splatterpunk, bizarro, and underground lit that I do, I wouldn't trust her around my genitals much less to be the mother of my children... and sure I read a crapton of classics and poetry and literary fiction, but I have an admitted bent toward the masculine side of these things). The book I am taking out, today, is Pagan Babies, about a burnt out priest who is scamming people into thinking he raising money for genocide orphans while he pockets it himself. Oh yeah, I'll flirt with that.

Anyhow, the gist of this post is to suggest that it does work, maybe. I wouldn't know, personally (you try attracting positive attention with Carlton Mellick III's Apeshit and see how that goes for you... besides, most my classics and more "flirty" reads are hardcover and I don't take dust jackets out), but I have heard some women talk about how awesome it is for a man to read a good book in public. Sure, if she doesn't think you are hot without the book, she isn't going to think you are hot with a book, but if she thinks you are a little warm at least, you might just be smoking with that copy of The Reader in hand. Here is a woman who wrote a particularly nice article on it: Abby Wong, READ, MAN! (click link for full bit) -

Unable to pull myself away from the beautiful sight of a man with a book in his hand, I walked back and forth in front of him, squinting to see the book’s title. I wanted to pin this image into my mind so I would remember it forever; the surreptitious glances I was throwing him was not enough to do that, so I began to stare right at him, boldly admiring the contours of a studious face.

HAWT!

Ok, time for me to take down some Pagan Babies.

Si Vales, Valeo

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