'My Taste Is Rather Boringly Conventional'

Readers often ask interesting questions. One wrote on Tuesday to say he enjoyed the “great variety” of writers and books I write about at Anecdotal Evidence. “I don’t see a consistent theme or genre or even a nationality,” he says. “Nothing you would choose to blog about would surprise me.” That’s reassuring. I like variety and don’t like to repeat myself too often. Then he asks questions I’ve never asked myself: “How would you define your taste? What do all the books and writers you like have in common?” My immediate, honest, unrehearsed answer: You got me. I’ve never looked for a grand unifying theory of anything. (One of the reasons I’ve lost most of my earlier interest in Coleridge.) I have a tolerance for inconsistency in writers and humans in general, but I also have prejudices that I can’t defend critically. I try to avoid bald-face snobbery, though it creeps in. And these prejudices have changed over time, which seems to me a natural progression. Taste, like other aspects of…