I'm a girl and within seconds of meeting a guy my age I

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I'm a girl and within seconds of meeting a guy my age I can tell whether or not he has read Infinite Jest and whether, consequently, he is someone I want to spend my time with. I meet a guy, he's quiet, reserved, he stutters and stumbles over basic sentences. He doesn't smile, he laughs politely and rarely, he wears clothes that are either too tight or too baggy and which look as if they were picked from a thrifstore clothesrack by his mother back in 2008. When I ask a question his answers come in "yes" and "no"s, when I begin talking about a subject he has expressed (mild) interest in he simply agrees with what I say and smiles the way a small child does when praised by his aunts at Christmas. In short this guy is not a reader. Instead of venturing out in the world, instead of asserting his will and demanding that the world yield to whatever demands he may have, instead of turns inward, his will is inverted, he would prefer to plummet than ascend. Rather than reach overcome his anxieties and mental peculiarities through empathy and conversation, he allows them to entirely dominate his perspective and disposition, to make themselves so much at home in his distorted psychology that the disorders and peculiarities and paranoid distortions themselves eventually become the essential substance of his character. I'd buy him a book ticket myself if I thought he had the courage to use it.