These differences of opinion did not strike me as a big deal. It was mildly disappointing, perhaps, that my boyfriend should be impressed by the drug-brag of Hunter Thompson and oblivious to the genius of Sybille Bedford. But it wasn’t as if I was auditioning him to be my literary adviser. Chacun à son goût, I thought.

He, on the other hand, was deeply troubled by our clashing literary tastes. He kept worrying at the subject — demanding to know how I could resist the charm of Thompson’s antic wit and what exactly was so alluring about Bedford’s “rich, snobby” characters. After a few nights, we gave up reading to each other, but his hectoring questions about why I liked what I liked (and didn’t like what I didn’t like) continued.

By the end of the vacation, we were at war. His view was that our failure to enjoy each other’s books was a sign of a more general and fatal incompatibility. (He couldn’t love someone who didn’t love Hunter Thompson.) My view was that he was fetishizing his own literary enthusiasms in a precious and rather creepy way. (I couldn’t love someone who placed such a premium on having his girlfriend underwrite his cultural preferences.) Soon after returning home, we parted ways.

The value of agreeing with one’s friends about books has always seemed to me overrated. Nothing in my experience suggests that literary taste is a reliable guide to a person’s character, or that shared literary passions bespeak deeper spiritual kinship. (Think for a moment of all those Nazis who loved Goethe.) I can see how disagreements about certain works of nonfiction might matter. If I were to come across a dear friend scribbling approving comments in the margins of “The Bell Curve,” that could be a game changer. And there are a few explicitly ideological novels (anything in the Ayn Rand oeuvre, for example) that I would be dismayed to find on a friend’s Favorite Books list. But the revelation in both these instances would be one of politics, of worldview, not of literary sensibility. Were a friend to tell me that he hated Jane Austen, my view of him and of our friendship would suffer not at all. I’ve known lots of fine men who did not “get” Austen and quite a few Janeites who were brutes. Besides which, my love of Austen is between Austen and me; it doesn’t need cheerleaders.

This surely is one of the great advantages of reading as a pursuit — that its pleasures do not rely on teammates or fellow enthusiasts, that the reader’s relationship with an author has no need of endorsement from third parties.