Mad Men, books, music and reading

To my mind, there appear to be three philosophies about listening to music while reading. The first group, we'll call them the Don Drapers, (quick aside, if you have not yet discovered the pure joy that is the television show Mad Men, stop reading this blog and rent the first two seasons right now. No, seriously. Watch them immediately.) Drapers like to concentrate on what it is that they are reading and find music to be an uncomfortable distraction if it's playing.

The second group, we'll call the Peggy Olsons. Peggy is an easy going person, but with some rules. They can listen to music but can only do so if the music has no words, just instruments playing. Jazz, classical, flamenco, shoe gazing rock, it doesn't matter just as long as it's soft and mellow.

And then in the third group we've got the Roger Sterlings. They can have anything on while reading. It can be hard core punk rock blasting from a boom box, an old Flaming Lips record on their Ipod or even the Jets-Saints football game on the TV. It just doesn't matter to them. They have the unique ability to focus on nothing and everything at the same time. Of course they can never recall anything that they had just read, but that's not really the point. Roger just wants to be entertained at all times.

People also can switch between camps. Sometimes I feel like ol' Roger, reading the paper while watching the Dodger game and sometimes I get very Draperish and need to have total silence while reading the latest Joshua Ferris novel. There are also other iterations of these three philosophies.

The Office
Angela - silence
Jim - quiet music
Michael Scott - it just doesn't matter

The Wire
Stringer Bell - shhhh
Lester Freeman - soft music
Jimmy McNulty - I'm drunk so it doesn't matter

Any others that you guys can think of?