On men and books – Mareen Dowd in NYT:

‘It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.
At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wantedto read “Northanger Abbey.” Men are reading less. Women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J. Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called “Hot Dudes Reading.”’

(…)

‘I asked my friend Richard Babcock, a former magazine editor and novelist who taught writing at Northwestern, about the male aversion to reading. His new novel is “A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon,” set in the Nevada desert in 1954 under the shadow of nuclear bomb testing. It follows three people whose lives are entwined. “The book is about guilt, adultery, murder, a chase through the mountains — you know, the usual day-to-day stuff,” Babcock said wryly.
“Not to blame the current cultural landscape on Ronald Reagan,” he said, “but I think the obsession with money and wealth that arrived in the 1980s may have encouraged the false idea in men that there was little to learn from a novel. If you want tips on how to crush your rival, better to read nonfiction.’

(…)

‘After that, a New Yorker named Paul Bergman emailed me an invitation to his book club — all men, lawyers and a judge who had gotten to know one another from the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office.
“For the last 45 years,” Bergman wrote me, “we’ve been sharing our thoughts on books we’ve read.” Would I join a few sessions on “Middlemarch”? Dear reader, I did.’

Read the article here.

How many times did I encounter a male at a party, after a book launch, in a bookstore, over dinner, who said: ‘My wife reads fiction, I don’t.’

Sometimes it was said slightly more charming: ‘My wife loves your books, can I take a picture of you?’

No lamenting, no cultural pessimism, it doesn’t matter how many readers you have, what counts is, who is reading you.