The Aesthete

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Whats-Your-Reading-Personality-Quiz?cid=fb_own_own_ReadQuiz

 

Not surprisingly, I got:

 

The Aesthete

You've read many works by classic authors—from Virgil and Shakespeare to Tolstoy, Stendhal, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Pablo Neruda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and you savor books by award-winning contemporary authors, from Salvage the Bones and A Visit from the Goon Squad, to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, On Beauty, Gilead or What Is the What. Plot and pacing are less important to you than the originality of the author's imagination and use of language. You revere writers whose words can exalt everyday experience into a shareable sublimeness. "Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past," Kate Atkinson writes in Life After Life. Discovering fresh perceptions like this is the reason you read. You're not put off if a sentence is as long as a paragraph, or if a paragraph fills a whole page, as long as the power of the author's voice continues unbroken. Nor do you mind if the book's characters are wicked, if the hero is unlucky; or if the settings are alien or hostile. The Aesthete can love Land of Love and Drowning without supporting witchcraft or adultery, and can adore The Way We Live Now without rooting for pyramid schemes. This sort of reader doesn't need a happy ending, or a neat Aesopian resolution. This sort of reader wants to immerse herself in the author's language and raptly take it all in.

What compels you above all is the sense of the author's sustained gift of expression, whether it be lyrical, understated or sonorous.