What I'm reading: typelists and Narcissus

Scott Plutchak comments perceptively on the questions I raise about TypePad's TypeLists. Of course he's right. I suppose I'm uncomfortable with the word consume: "one of the best ways to present your identity is by presenting supplemental information that’s important to you, such as the media you consume" (from the Typepad manual): I resist the idea that i am defined by the shoe polish I use or the lavatory paper I prefer, and the fact that these lists link one automatically to Amazon, where anyone who wants to follow my interests has to part with money, is part of the problem (why not to the BL, LC or, best of all, the user's local library catalogue? Much better). But of course literature and music are not the same as the brand of gin I prefer.
How many thousand love affairs begin with shared literary. artistic, or musical interests?  I should be wary of any woman who found my reading of Gibbon alluring, though. And of course my objections cannot be that strong, otherwise I would not use the blessed things
I suppose my objections are also rooted in the British academic tradition of self-deprecation and understatement: when presenting at conferences in continental Europe, if I suggest, as is only polite, that my work is fundamentally worthless and derivative, the audience look terribly puzzled: "why is this man bothering to talk to us if he knows what he is saying is crap?" they ask themselves. "And why on earth did the conference organisers accept his abstract?"
Oh; Robert Wyatt was the drummer with the Soft Machine, part of the Canterbury scene, where I went to university, though a little later, he left the Soft Machine (who then became dull and uninteresting) after which he formed  Matching Mole (pun: French machine moelle) whose records I've lost and sadly don't seem to have ever made it to CD, and has since had an interesting solo career , despite  falling out of a window  and being confined to a wheelchair. Most widely know for covering the Monkees I'm a believer, and for  Shipbuilding, written by Elvis Costello, the best anti-Thatcher song at the time of the Falklands/Malvinas war. Don't bother with the William J. Mitchell book: saw it reviewed in Wired, and though it sounded interesting, actually it's rather dull