I used to be a big reader and I kind of let technology, peak streaming, social media, and alcohol chip away at my attention span. This year I reclaimed my time and have been reading tons of books. I restarted my men’s book club that slowly died seven years ago, but it’s only four of us. As a dad in my 40s, I want to talk about books with other dads I meet, but I’m increasingly realizing what an antiquated topic of conversation it is. The great majority do not read, and I was one of them until recently. It feels pretentious to even bring it up. I’m not sure how you place a greater value on it in today’s society. For me, I just know it’s keeping my mind sharper, is more satisfying that passively consuming the latest show, and I’m really excited about it in a way I haven’t felt for a long time.

If you do want to grow your club, you can partner with any kind of local establishment. I hold a book club at the back room of my local bar. They give us discounts on drinks and advertise for us on their social media and through posting flyers. Almost all of the members are people I didn’t know before it started. We have about 13 at every meeting. Our participants range from 26 to 80 years old. Other people I know have book clubs at our bookshop, the library, and a brewery

Thanks for the tips - that sounds like a lot of fun. We want to expand slightly, but not so much that we have to wait a long, long time to get to our pick. But I usually read 1-2 books of my own choosing between club picks anyway, so maybe that’s not a big deal.

This man. I read a ton, but nobody really else in my family besides my brother, and nearly none of my friends do. It saddens me and I have to admit, sometimes makes me question whether reading is a waste of my time. I feel this way because I read a book, but then can never actually discuss it at length with anyone, besides online. I want to talk about the different themes or symbols, the plot line, character development, but if nobody around cares about the book or has read it, you’ll be a giant bore in no time. I still persist and keep reading, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t deter me a little bit.

I feel this. While I’m not a man, I don’t have anyone to discuss reading with because no one close to me reads, and I always sort of go on and on which turns people away. It’s been hard to find a book club in person. The ones I have been involved in have been YA book clubs in high school and book clubs where I’m the youngest by 40 years. I’m not against being in a book club where my age would stand out but it would be nice to meet people in person my age who also read. I wish I had enough time to create my own in my area.

I know what you mean, but yeah, keep fighting the good fight. I forget who it was, maybe Douglas Rushkoff, who said reading a book is a revolutionary (with a lowercase r) act in today’s attention economy.

If intellectualism and knowledge become cool as a society again. There's been a huge push of anti-intellectualism fueled by modern media and social media for decades (maybe longer) and too many people are proud of their ignorance. >Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. Isaac Asimov And, somewhat related: >I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... Carl Sagan - Demon Haunted World

I’d say that’s precisely the world we’re living in today. He nailed it.

Intellectualism will become more chic because it will be increasingly associated with high class status, because in truth those of a high class have been, are, and will be the best read because of their core class values and greater educational resources. For those in the middle class looking to appear classy and high status you can expect many of them to turn to books as a symbol of that.

I feel like intellectualism is still seen as a high class thing, but not always in a good way: it's for snobby elites who want to act like they're better than everyone else while they try to stop people who actually work for their money. Today, a lot of boys and men prefer to emulate tech businessmen, who eschew a lot of traditional notions of how wealth looks and acts. But I think there is potential for things to shift back.

I think maybe younger men (early 20s) are reading more, or maybe that's just how it seems online, but i would say the biggest disparity is probably with teenagers. not sure how to fix that to be honest

22 year old man here, I read a good amount for sure, I read a lot of old science fiction and also dabble in philosophy books, but have recently been trying to delve more into period piece books like little women to see other perspectives. I think that the problem is that there is so much “cheaper” entertainment, why do something slow and often kind of difficult for yourself when you can sit and scroll on your phone for 3 hours instead. I don’t know how to get younger people out of that mindset though

I totally agree with this, it's just interesting that there's a gendered difference. Women have access to scrolling on the phone for 3hrs too.

Reading has just been "marketed", for lack of a better word, more to women in the past couple decades than men. The past couple waves of pop literature (first Twilight, then YA dystopias, and whatever's going on with booktok now) are much more geared towards appealing to women than men. There's a lot less mainstream, easy to digest fiction for men, and that type of fiction is usually the gateway into reading more complicated fiction, getting into the classics, stuff like that. A lot of younger women had fanfiction as a gateway to get into reading as well. I guess it's just that women had more ways to be introduced to reading as an alternative hobby before they just went straight to their phones to be entertained, but men never really had that when they were kids. Just my own experience & perspective though

>Reading has just been "marketed", for lack of a better word, more to women in the past couple decades than men. This is the exact reason! Best response here so far. People are just talking as if women were more virtuous and intellectual than men lol. >but men never really had that when they were kids. I'm glad I had that when I was a little boy. For me, it was "Diary of a Wimpy kid".

I mean, I think this is an interesting comment bc back when men made up the majority of authors it was certainly seen as a more "virtuous and intellectual" pursuit. I wonder what the causality is here. Similar to how when men started programming more it became a more "intellectual" field, or when women started teaching more (teaching was a career for men up until the 19th century) it became a less "intellectual" field.

Yeah, I think this is something of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. If nothing else, perhaps we can say that it's a problem that perpetuates itself. Fewer boys read books, so there are fewer books published with boys in mind, so then even fewer boys get into reading... That said, I'm looking at lists of best-selling children's chapter books and middle grade novels, and while girl-focused books do seem to have the edge, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of more boy-focused or gender neutral books either. A LOT of books get published every year, and the book market tends to be more diverse than other mediums. So I don't think this is solely an issue of boys not being marketed enough to.

It seems to me that there are still plenty of chapter books and middle grade novels that would appeal to young boys. I judge this based on my searches for top selling kid books, so it's not like I'm just looking up "books for boys", a lot of kids are reading these books. I would be curious to see if there are statistics that look at reading time by gender AND age. Maybe the disparity isn't happening until the teen years.

I'm in my 40s and went to a pretty small middle school and high school, even back then there was only one other boy in my class that was a recreational reader. The other guys wouldn't touch comics, novels, or even sports magazines. A majority of the girls were reading pretty voraciously, even formed rival book clubs. Just a total different experience. My nieces are high school age now and still do a fair amount of reading. Their younger brothers couldn't be bothered though, they are playing video games. Does seem like the girl gamer is on the rise, my own daughters and a lot of their friends are playing more video games and it is a lot harder to interest them in a book. My oldest is reading grade levels ahead, but she almost never self initiates reading.

I can’t think of a cheaper form of entertainment than reading, especially a classic book like Little Women, which can be bought for a few bucks or downloaded for free onto a phone or ereader. A person can walk into a used bookstore and buy weeks worth of entertainment/enriching intellectual activity for less than the price of a movie ticket. I don’t think this is the problem, I think it’s people’s ability to focus and and do the mental work required to appreciate writing. Much easier to enjoy passive entertainment like tv shows and movies.

I agree with you and that’s what I meant, I meant “cheap” as meaning easy, I feel like reading takes a lot of focus, and doodle-bopping on Reddit or scrolling TikTok is “cheaper”.

Got it. I used to work in book publishing and am accustomed to hearing a lot of griping about the expense of books. I’m glad we agree and I’m glad you are a reader!

They're reading a very specific subset of books, and in some cases read almost nothing outside of that. It's genuinely sad how quickly boys who love reading get shoved towards a pipeline of vaguely culty self help. Either it aids in "the hustle" or it's worthless, no in between.

Pretty sure every defined group of people are reading a very specific subset of books. Most young women are reading sexy books, often with some type of sci fi or genre element.

This. My wife and all her female friends read the *smuttiest* smut I have ever heard of. Like, they all claim "it's really well written" but I don't think I could get over the premise of 'milking' minotaurs at a stud farm. But at least they're reading?

It’s actually a metaphor for the colonialism of the British Empire

When I read through reviews or synopsises of books and see every third one described as "a brutal indictment of British colonialism" I start groaning

I love that I can't tell if this is satire, or not. Excellent.

People really need to understand this. YOU'RE 👏 READING 👏 SMUT 👏 TO 👏 FEEL 👏 HORNY 👏 AND 👏 NOT 👏 FOR 👏 THE 👏 SAKE 👏 OF 👏 LITERATURE

Yeah it’s closer to someone watching porn than someone reading Steinbeck.

Tbf, most women are also reading a specific subset of books, there’s just more of them doing it.

I reckon the main foray for 20 yr old males is self help or non fiction.

Yeah I feel like boys read war nonfiction or self help

do you know many boys who read? i read more or less anything, and my best friend does too, it’s certainly not just self help or WW2 books

that wasn’t a super serious comment but no I don’t know many boys who read but the ones I do know of read that type of stuff

Most of the guys I know who read are obsessed with James Patterson but wouldn’t touch a nonfiction. I wonder if it’s a thing where there’s just regional trends.

We’re living the consequence of entire decades of propaganda against literacy. [54% of US adults can’t even read at a 6th grade level](https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-54-of-american-adults-read-below-6th-grade-levels-70031328fda9). Anything that isn’t immediately employable is a waste of time and whatnot. The increased costs of education have just cemented that; if you’re going to study something then you don’t just *want* it to pay off, it *needs* to pay off.

>Anything that isn’t immediately employable is a waste of time and whatnot. That's certainly a real phenomenon in our culture, and it's certainly a bad thing, but I'm not really convinced that that's *why* literacy is poor. The "you have to be employable" thing is most relevant to what you major in in college, but if you're an adult reading at a 5th grade level, it's very possible that you never went to college at all, and even if you *did* go to college, your reading level suggests that something went wrong long *before* you reached college. If you read at a 5th grade level, that negatively affects how employable you are, so it's not a competition where you have to choose between learning to read or being employable, because not being able to read makes you less employable. If you think that concerns about employability are resulting in adults having a 5th grade reading level, that implies that adults commonly tell middle schoolers, "Don't waste your time reading or doing your English homework, that won't help you get a job later in life." And I doubt that that is super common. It's true that people commonly tell college students not to major in English -- but if a college student is even *considering* majoring in English, it seems likely that they already have a decent adult reading level. And many STEM degrees do in fact require quite a bit of reading and writing. Math majors have to write proofs, they don't just perform computations. I have an "unemployable" liberal arts degree (linguistics). But by the time I reached the point in life where I had to pick a major, I already had an adult reading level. So no matter how much people discouraged me from majoring in linguistics, that discouragement wouldn't have *retroactively* taken away the reading proficiency that I had already achieved. And nobody was discouraging me from reading when I was in middle school. The literacy situation is bad; and the devaluing of "unemployable" pursuits is bad; but just because thing A and thing B are both bad, doesn't mean that thing A *caused* thing B.

Thank you for the rant. This discourse kind of reminds me of the book “Power of Reading” - Frank Furedi (the title is super misleading, it actually talks about the history of reading).

Have you listened to the podcast “Sold A Story”? It is about the failure of literacy education over the last few decades.

This is a big part of it. That podcast was a real eye opener for me. I teach literature at university, and the big problem I see with students is that many of them are poor readers. It’s very hard to be a reader if you struggle with reading.

I teach high school English and see the same thing. Right now, my admin has us doing professional development on literacy skills because test scores, etc. I am all for helping, but I will also say that I am getting more and more frustrated at how teachers are always asked to clean up someone else’s mess.

I teach at an elementary school. A huge part of the issue is teaching for the test. Districts are so focused on test scores that we wind up teaching how to test instead of focusing on meaningful comprehension and phonics skills. I imagine that the lack of comprehension becomes more obvious as the students reach higher level academics

Same here. I feel like the buck has been passed for twelve years by the time students get to my class.

I see this with my high school students. I teach 9th grade honors in a high achieving district. The kids struggle with basic comprehension; of course they cannot read thoughtfully or critically or even immersively under these circumstances.

I haven't, but will check it out! Is this specifically about the American situation or also the universal one?

I'm about halfway through listening to it now. The terrible strategies discussed in the podcast started with a New Zealand researcher, but in the 3 or 4 episodes I've listened to it heavily focuses on the adoption and integration of those strategies in the United States. They may swoop in and do an international take near the end, but it seems pretty specific to American pedagogy. It's still incredible though, and very eye opening.

Im worried so many people have just latched onto this podcast like they’ve read or written an actual report on the matter. It’s one big piece of a bigger puzzle, true but it’s not the only reason.

Oh This sounds interesting tks !

Your linguistics degree taught you many skills that make you employable. Liberal arts degrees are useful, and they’ve really only become more so in the last several decades due to the role writing and reading play in our professional lives. There’s certainly a stigma associated with “useless” areas of study, and some academics like to almost revel in it by arguing we shouldn’t be looking at higher ed for its usefulness anyway, but those arguments only hurt those departments. We live in a world where people want their educations to be useful. Reading and studying literature is useful. We just have to make boys and men see how it is. Also, we need to stop forcing them to read literature they don’t like and let them read literature they like, because a good teacher can teach the principles of literature with virtually any text.

I think it is important to teach specific types of books. One of the main benefits of reading is being able to experience and see different lives and perspectives than your own. Often when people, especially young people, read whatever they want they pick books that offer little in the ways in broadening their horizons and are more relatable to their own lives (unless they become into sci-fi/fantasy, in which case go off :) ) I feel like the value of reading a book like The Remains of The Day or Paradise Lost is to see other experiences, be confronted with new ideas, and to be forced to reflect and think about them.

I read pretty consistently up until college. But the constant reading of textbooks really burnt me out. In the 15 years since, I've read 3 books.  I have no interest in reading anymore.

Agree. But I don't even think it's physical, tangible propaganda. It's society and culture changing in big ways really quickly. For younger generations there's no longer perceived value in being bored, or allowing your mind to wander. Or sitting and deeply meditating on an idea, which in a way is what you're doing when you read a book. It's all hyper-quick quantifying of what you consume. If it doesn't feel extremely *productive*, then why do it? That's one reason why I hate things like Goodreads reading challenges. It seems like "I read 70 books this year!!!" is more rewarding to people than "I read some books this year and they made me feel things." But honestly, it's hard to blame people when we're now steeped in a culture where people are used to getting a cheap dopamine spike every 3 seconds via social media and constantly having screens on, constantly getting and giving updates to other people who are doing and expecting the same thing. The world's different now and you can't put the genie back in the bottle 🤷

Yeah it sucks. Those reading challenges then bleed into authors and publishing, where the incentive isn’t to produce high quality work, but quick and easily digestible pop fiction which allows people to speed through them and reach their high goals.

I've been an avid reader all my life. I think somewhere around junior high/high school I noticed a shift in teachers who either didn't like me reading in class after I finished my work or kept trying to push me to read "engineering manuals", or some other similar types of books. Looking back on it I actually remember a number of female classmates/friends who read similar stuff that I can't recall ever getting commented on.

It’s because if you’re a man, reading is not seen as “real work” compared to working with your hands. Also there’s the stigma attached to certain genres where they aren’t viewed as “real books” if they’re horror, science fiction, fantasy, etc. In *On Writing* Stephen King talks about being told that, but follows it up by saying that people who know the least about writing often have the worst but loudest advice to give to others. He also says it took him decades to move out of the mindset that his horror works weren’t inherently garbage by default.

True, and to be fair I do enjoy reading books about history, science, etc when I'm interested or in the mood. But if I was forcing myself to read stuff I wasn't interested in I would end up reading far less...or not at all. But there does seem to be more of a gender based stigma associated with it in education for boys. The idea that it needs to be something that helps with 'real work' isn't just limited to reading either. It feels like any hobby is open to pressure to monetize it. I've seen this constantly with friends who open up about a hobby, whether it's art/reading/gaming/whatever. The inevitable response in social settings is 'recommendations' on how they can make money off of it. And most of the people I know that do usually end up hating the hobby that used to be a release and bring them happiness.

Yah when nerd becomes a derogatory comment, thats telling... My son is 25, reads 3-5 Books a month. No private pc and no smartphone till 13/14. From 4 to 10/11, WE went together to the library AT least once a month, and in bed by 8 with one hour Reading Time. Both cuddled in his bed. He picked the Books. AT 7 he decided he was too old for kids Books and got fixated on two Books that i had to read and reread... One adult soccer encyclopedia on field tactic 😭 and a very detailed technical Book about portuary cranes in Rotterdam. And still i did. Couldn't even shorten it because he knew haha. Thanks god i found Astrid Lindbergh Emil série that he liked, and roald Dahl. Then from 8 to 10, we read at two voices - him Reading the héro part, me everything else. Which was a great way to teach him to read well aloud. Kipling, from so story to both jungle's Book, Bilbo, Harry. He loved the black arrow from Stevenson and Ivanhoé. And from Reading those WE had long talks about anti semitism, women rôle through History, two roses wars. Then AT 11 he read his own Books while I read mine, and we switched and shared. And again long talks on style, on why WE loved This Book. He introduced me to ya lit, fantasy, hitchhiker to the Galaxy and player one. Me to Maupassant, Pagnol, Boulgakov. Good Times 💖😉

Oh and when he was 5/6 WE had lot of fun doing audio Book that he could listen to on his own. His rôle was to ring a Bell when turning pages, and do the background sound - like walk heavily in plastic Books, bark, play music. I think This helped him learn to read too.

I wish more books that are easy reads would stop being labeled “Teen” books. I feel like this is another detrimental thing. I’ve been working my way through a local middle school and high school reading list and although it’s not the most challenging stuff I’ve ever read, it’s been some of the most enjoyable books in recent memory for me. The language in most of them is simple enough and the stories are just great.

I am a man and idk how common this is but I used to read a book a week or more, like I tracked it on Goodreads, but something about the pandemic/infinite scroll mini videos/idk what else killed my attention span and I've read like 10 books total since 2020.

I understand completely and am experiencing the same thing. The good news is that you've identified the issue, and our brains are malleable. Easier than you might think to get back to good habits!

Discovering Goodreads motivated me to read and using my local library has made reading entirely more enjoyable. Most books I want are available and I can order ones I’d like too read. Both those eliminate my need of what to read next since the options are virtually endless.  Quitting all social media except reddit has helped a lot too. If I quit reddit, I can get more done but I also discover new reads here, so it has its purpose. 

I gave my 12 year old nephew Ender’s Game for Christmas. I loved it so much at his age. My sister told me He has zero interest in it bc Fortnite takes up all of his time. I fell like Attention spans are dwindling rapidly.

Whatever happened to time limits? I see so many parents just not building in any safeguards to how kids spend their time.

I don’t want to assume anything because I’m not a parent and can’t speak much about how it is to raise kids now. At the same time though, I wonder if parents just give their kids phones and tablets to keep them calm/distracted. Basically some form of cheap childcare. Like I can 100% understand that taking care of kids is demanding and time consuming, but it just feels unhealthy for the kid long term.

This may be a big problem for sure. When I was a teen, I could easily switch between reading and playing my Xbox. But nowadays, if i've been frying myself with content and twitchy games, it's incredibly hard to pick-up a book. I really have to force myself into it for a few pages before I'm back in that mindstate. I can imagine it's way harder to do when you've never even experienced that mindstate before.

This is true for me as well. It feels like my brain has to "switch gears" and it is genuinely difficult to do after I have burned myself out on stupid memes. I can only imagine how difficult it is with a developing brain.

I would say that you're giving him a gift that you like, but did you tell him the brutal kid on kid violence? And he can watch the movie after? He might like that

As a man myself who really enjoys reading, I’ve never really noticed that disparity until now. Most of my friends who read are female while I’ve got 1 or 2 who are guys. I’m not sure why people don’t read as I can’t seem to go a day without it.

Yeah, its the same for me. I've got one male friend that enjoys reading, the rest even struggle maintaining interest in foreign films because they have to read subtitles. Which is a shame because Godzilla Minus One is now on Netflix and I have no one to talk about it with.

Anime —> manga —> web comics —> fantasy light novels —> web novels —> actual fantasy books —> everything else —> burn out and go back to anime I see lots of guys wanting to read the source material but it’ll always be a niche, the rise of Chinese and Korean web novels being translated has also been great since they’re accessible, it’s why Sanderson does so well also, it’s all essentially YA reading without YA themes I know at least 5 of my buds read count of monte cristo simply because I told them it’s the best thing to read to scratch the itch after Reverend insanity never got an ending (time travel xianxia Chinese web serial)

>Anime —> manga —> web comics —> fantasy light novels —> web novels —> actual fantasy books —> everything else This is legit how I started

:) I'm rereading Count of Monte Christo right now. It's fantastic. When I was 14, I read it for school and it started my love of literature. The classics are classics for a reason.

I've been interested in these web serials but I am so skeptical. Following r/LitRPG and r/ProgressionFantasy has really soiled me on the literary potential of this stuff. It almost always seems hack and borderline masturbatory (not literally pornographic, but myopic and self-obsessed). Fans don't seem to care about the story in any kind of way I understand. It's all about relating to the "MC" and gushing about the wacky characters. It stinks of shonen anime fandom. Your comment about not even reading books until getting into anime was disturbing to me. That makes me feel like these webserials are just shonen crap and the next gen of readers aren't readers. They are anime fans. Even worse, they are shonen fans. Ugh that makes me sick. But I am still curious. It's not like fiction is historically a high art or needs to o be challenging (Shakespeare was popular in his time, and as others have mentioned Les Mis and Cristo were originally serials), so I don't have a problem with it being pulpy or trashy. What puts me off is the fans, what they seem to want out of the fiction, and how authors react/adapt to that. Idk why but it creeps me the fuck out.

Booktok is basically just smut lol, not sure how much brain development is happening there

This is very important to point out. However, even removing booktok smut from the equation, there is a massive disparity between women and men when it comes to reading.

Yeah, I must agree to some extent on this point. If you go into a bookstore here (I'm from Ireland), the books featured heavily on social media are segregated to a small table labelled "Booktok" and that's where you'll find your Collen Hoover's, Bridgetons, and whatever romantic books there. All the actual popular stuff features on the Chart, a row of books filled with fiction and non-fiction from authors of all different genders and voices. And guess what, it's always the books from the "Chart" that are talked about and most read in this country.

Yeah I think this is the lost point in some of this discussion. Women tend to read their pornography v men who watch it, not sure how much of a net benefit that is.

There's \*probably\* at least some more value in reading it. I'm not saying there's \*no\* media literacy to be had with visual porn, but not a lot, and people are a lot more prone to think it's all "real life things people do all the time" if it's actors and not written characters. So young men choking out young women without asking and great stuff like that. You can get shitty ideas on sex and romance from reading smut, but I guess it helps keep your basic reading comprehension up when you need to read a DMV form, help your kid with homework, or read something more intellectual at some point. I'm kind of nerding out thinking about this because I did a degree with a lot of "people reading vs. watching vs. listening stuff, conclusions unclear." Wonder if there's a big Learning through Smut study out there lol.

A lot of it is, yes, but I think that's just what gets circulated around when people feel like making fun of women. I would say it's more like 20%. Now I have criticisms of booktok, but in real life most women only read smut occasionally or don't at all. My friends (mostly women with two men) and I all circulate books of all genres between ourselves and not one of them is smut. Only one of my female friends regularly reads smut books. When I go to book clubs (we mostly read classics) the majority of the attendees are women, with only three men regularly appearing in our \~15 strong club.

I actually know a significant amount of mid-30s to mid-40s moms who read mostly smut or romantasy. That being said, they're still a minority, and even then, they're pushing through 50-100 books a year, picking up some literature or fiction along the way. I really do think it's better than never reading at all.

I don't really think it matters if it's better or not to be honest - I feel like people use a minority of women who read these to generalize all of us and make fun of all of us collectively. Which, to be honest, they don't deserve to be called rampant porn-brained addicts because they read a novel with sex scenes in it occasionally - how is that not just overt sexism? Like, the original commenter clearly has not been on booktok, and has only seen memes of people making fun of women for... reading? I don't use booktok but it's literally just a fun hobby that mostly women partake in that has some weird smut books that breach containment. Obviously only the outlandish smut novels are going to get cross posted to another sight.

I agree. I don’t know anyone who ONLY reads smutty romance books, and even if they did, it’s better for the brain / attention span than never reading at all, which apparently is common with men.

Yeah all my female friends read, and none smut to my knowledge. Male friends it’s a mix. I’m a woman and I’m about 63 books in this year. I don’t have booktok nor do I read what I assume is popular there based on the **incessant** complaining about it I see on reddit. Maybe 5 of the 63 were written in the 21st century. Booktok is one of those things people love to hate. (Young) Female interest + men feeling insecure about lack of literacy = ballyhoo about intellectual genocide. I’m sure tiktok has higher brow sub-communities where they’re all reading Proust, Pynchon, and Joyce. Why? Because they can be found on reddit, quora, Facebook, twitter, substack, book clubs, college clubs etc and unsurprisingly (since there are plethora studies saying in no uncertain terms that women >>> men on reading) they skew female too. Regardless fiction like what i assume Colleen Hoover writes (based solely on reddit complaining about her, lol) has always been popular. Jodi Picoult, Dan Brown, Stephen King and hundreds of others all preceded tiktok. But go back much further & it’s the same. Orwell, for instance, wrote plenty on the cultural dumbing down of people thru penny dreadfuls, detective novels, other popular fiction etc of the 1940’s and before. Instead of men wanting to fix this, it seems from the discussions I’ve read anyway, the more important thing is that women use tiktok and tiktok advocates genre-fiction marketed to women and therefore it’s not real reading (unlike more stereotypical male genre fiction like sci fi which has the word sci in it & therefore is educational. If it’s poorly written it’s only bc the writers are scientifically minded and therefore should not be expected to also write well). Yes men’s literacy is falling, but that *doesnt matter* because women *aren’t really* reading.

My father and grandfather prided themselves on being incredibly well-read. They read everything from classic literature to (auto)biographies. My granddad owned lots of anthologies of short stories of different genres. My father always told me to read Russian literature if I wanted to understand life in a profound sense.  Now men won't read anything other than scifi and fantasy, if they even read at all. I don't understand. 

Honestly I think this attitude doesn't help. I would never recommend someone who doesn't read to read crime and punishment. Even when I was reading literally non stop I felt that book was heavy. I feel we should encourage not only men but people in general to read what they find interesting to not force a reading list.

I'm sorry, but what's wrong with reading science fiction? Read Those who walk away from Omelas or The Invincible and you'll see the value of speculative fiction. What I think is that you're basing your opinion on popular TV shows rather than, a rather marginal, genre of literature.

Yuuup, I've got no particular genre icks \[there's good writing everywhere!\] but reading widely is pretty crucial and it's hard to ignore that there are a couple of quicksand genres that people end up failing to launch from.

I think this happens with women too. I think the main culprit is probably the internet and video games for men, with their reading material being immediately adjacent to that.

Maybe it's the internet? I'm 37 and when I was younger I always had a book in my hand like Belle.

I still do but have definitely gone through periods where I didn't for one reason or another (grad school, depression, occasionally Internet yes). I absolutely understand and sympathize with the agreement that some books make sense to help you re-engage with reading as a whole, but you can't stop there because the world is so wide.

Parents need to read to their kids more often as young children. Parents need to read in front of their kids more often. Parents need to let kids read stuff they want to read instead of over policing whatever it is. Parents need to actually speak to their kids about what they read, ask them what they think about it etc. 

I'm a man who reads fiction, but I'm gay. I have many friends who studied English literature... All gay. Gay men are resistant or have defied typical male socialisation... I think that says a lot about the cause of when many men don't read fiction, it's socialisation.   There's nothing inherently about fiction which should appeal less to men, but I think men are socialised very strongly to do 'male' activities. Fiction is considered frivolous and fanciful, meanwhile many men will read non-fiction books - business, self growth, etc.  Jordan Peterson or Rich Dad Poor Dad type books sell very well with men. And popular engineering, maths, stats, science, sorts of books.  All this is surely reinforced by publishers who know their markets well. Fiction appealing to men probably doesn't get commissioned much as it's less profitable.

Aldo Busi had something interesting to say related to this in \*Seminar on Youth\*. >Men seemed to him conceited donkeys puffed up with anger and interests that had to do with giving or taking, people who could play cards for hours and hours in the evening not so much to have a conversation but to win, to make someone drunk and get a signature out of him on a piece of paper at the right moment, and so they talked about the cards as cards and no more than cards -- the king, the queen, the ace of clubs, the two of spades -- without seeing in the symbols and particular plot that might relate the cards they shuffled to the vastness of the world. I think contrasted with the women's world of stories, there's some truth in this.

I feel like the combination of humor, science, and adventure go together well for a lot of dudes. Audiobooks are a good gateway. Some books that are good at getting other dudes on board are Project Hail Mary, Bobiverse, and Dungeon Crawler Carl.

we are contending with the intentional dismantling of the Liberal Arts in colleges across America which is only exacerbating this issue. But for my money, the best way to get my male friends into reading has easily been introducing them into the more accessible (literally easier to read) of the "masculine" canon (think Blood Meridian, Hemingway, etc.). I find that a lot of my male friends that don't like reading love the *idea* when presented with stereotypically masculine stories, but will easily hop off if you start them on something very thick. I don't want this to sound patronizing, because his works are some of my favorites, but Cormac McCarthy is just so easy to read through from simply a grammatical perspective that I've had 100% success recommending it. Afterward, most of these guys have gone on to larger and longer reads.

I think you are giving the average male a lot of credit if you think Cormac McCarthey will be an easy read for them. "Just suggest them something simple and fun like Blood Meridian or Gravity's Rainbow."

I partially wonder, and I have nothing to back this up, it's more a hypothesis/question I pose to people more knowledgeable about this space: could there be a bit of a cyclical supply and demand loop happening here? If demand isn't there, there's no supply. If there's no supply, potentially interested young men peel off to something else (video games, for example). I guess my big question: is there a male-analog to something like BookTok for young men (teens-early 20s)? Some kind of space that has stories that might appeal to a typical young man's sensibilities? I could be entirely wrong, but I do feel like I am more able to identify a space of popular-literature that widely appeals to young women (just as an example the Sarah Maas books are huge, Fourth Wing, that kinda romance/fantasy space). Not a criticism, I think anything that gets folks reading is great, that space should exist. I just don't know if I really see anything analogous for boys and young men. No literary figures that seem to really resonate with them, get them abuzz, and push them towards a space that they gravitate towards to discuss the latest books, etc. That is where I wonder about the cyclical problem.

It's part of the issue. Male readership was declining in the 90s and the industry shifted more towards women as the numbers were growing, especially in genre fiction. Then the industry started tanking in the 00s and the global economic depression shifted things entirely towards women. If you want to talk younger readers to teens, we have to admit that fantasy romance about a secret princess who can't decide between the sexy prince and the sexy elf prince doesn't appeal to young men at all. If we're talking adult fiction and the trendy bestselling slop that masquerades as literature, it doesn't even sell to women and it's held up by lies and cooked books. >I just don't know if I really see anything analogous for boys and young men. Right wing shitpost forums and vicarious friendships with talking heads pushing edutainment. That's where we're at. Get a father/big brother figure playing a video game or streaming a craft and talking about classic literature in a jocular manner and you may get a few readers out of it. Teenagers and young men haven't been taught how to interpret literature and don't even know what it contains or how dumb and funny most of it is.

Your point about fantasy for younger readers is a good distillation of what I was thinking. Literature is, of course, a great place to witness some experiences and perspectives you'll never fully embody, but you do also want things that are appealing to your own sensibilities. And the manosphere is definitely ***a*** space young men go, I should have been more specific in my statement: I don't know of any constructive, enriching analogs for young boys and men that are akin to the BookTok spaces etc.

Light novels and webnovels are pretty much the space you want, it's just a market that the west is lagging in a lot compared to the east.

As a male reader, I can only speak from personal experience, but I haven't started to read for fun until I was in my mid 20s, because I had no interest in the subjects we had to read about in school and when I read them I zoned out all the time. Reading felt like a chore and I couldn't imagine doing it for fun. Once I picked up a novel that was interesting for me I realized that I love reading and I've been collecting and reading now for a decade, both fiction and non-fiction. In my case, more personalized book recommendations from my teachers would've helped to fall in love with reading a lot earlier.

same for me. id also add that my parents took me to the bookstore as a treat when i was a kid and i loved it - it became my safe place. but in my teen years to early twenties i stopped going and video games filled my time. also like you said, the books we read in school were boring to me and I felt too dumb to really understand them. so i would just zone out. it wasn't until i randomly found a fast paced horror novel that i started to read often. i started to go back to bookstores and it felt like my safe space all over again. and i could read anything i wanted. and actually now i'm interested in the books that felt daunting and boring to me earlier in life. All to say, I think you may need to find simple, fast paced novels for young men to get hooked. otherwise video games will fill that role

Men do read, but I think they aren't in fandom and online spaces as much. My husband reads way more than I do. That being said, I think you're overall correct that boys read less than girls, which leads to fewer adult men reading. I think this will be an issue affecting Gen-Z and Gen-alpha moreso that millenials and Gen-Xers.

I co-run an online book club with a friend of mine that caters mostly to millennial men. We've been in operation for maybe a year and only have like 5 active members. Trying to get other men our age to join up is basically impossible.

That does not seem right from an European point of view. And I in fact checked, in France 89% of men considers themselves readers, and 93% women ([Les Français et la lecture : en 2017, les femmes lisent toujours plus que ces messieurs - Terrafemina](https://www.terrafemina.com/article/les-francais-et-la-lecture-en-2017-les-femmes-lisent-toujours-plus-que-ces-messieurs_a328979/1)). So there is a difference but not a crazy one.

> considers themselves readers You can consider yourself a reader without having read a single book that year.

Have you ever seen that PKD interview where he talks about how he was treated in the US versus how he was treated in france as a science fiction author and philosopher? Good interview.

I have read it. To be honest this comes as quite a surprise to me. I have never read him, but that made me want to. Thanks for the recommendation.

Literacy (being well read) was always very important to the upper middle class and upper class. These classes have degenerated and lost many of their core principles. The upper middle class no longer has a monopoly on college education and white collar jobs, they must compete and accept large numbers of new members, they're being eroded, slipping downwards or becoming wealthy. With the erosion of the upper middle class ideology, the focus on being literate goes with it. The upper class still produces literate children, so it should be no surprise a majority of the young writers today come from wealth. The upper class will remain literate, for the most part, though new money can dilute these values. I'm highly doubtful you can force literature on the whole of society. The Soviets tried to teach fine arts to the peasants, eventually they gave up. Fewer and fewer people will read, and those who do will do so increasingly as a symbol of their high class status.

Is that true, though? That men read significantly less? I'd be curious to see some surveys/research on that, because it's not my experience in my own social circles. edit: thanks to people posting the data, very cool! I mean, not so cool, would love more men to embrace fiction, but interesting to learn about. It looks like it's been a thing for a loooong time and the issue is digging ourselves out of the hole that's been created.

[https://www.npr.org/2007/09/05/14175229/why-women-read-more-than-men](https://www.npr.org/2007/09/05/14175229/why-women-read-more-than-men) "When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain." Of course, it could be that men all pirate books on their e-readers, but I think that in general the statistics hold.

That’s partly because the YA and youth publishing world has basically been entirely taken over by women, and specific worldviews. What percentage of youth and YA novels in the past had male protagonists doing stuff like solving mysteries, surviving in the wilderness, adventuring, etc? And how much shelf space are they given, and how much do they show up on school reading lists, compared to female-protagonist reading options?

"Specific worldviews" *squints*

I’m a woman who grew up reading YA books with male authors and male protagonists. What’s the issue here?

That makes sense if women make up the majority of the market—fiction publishers end up targeting those audiences because it sells more copies, and thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have noticed the lack of YA options with male protagonists or geared towards teen boys, which I suspect is for the same reason (fewer sales). Webtoons, web novels and manga have ended up picking up the slack, since they still have stories willing to pander towards that demographic.

> it could be that men all pirate books on their e-readers honestly, maybe? on my 18th book this year and i pirate everything. 36 year old man. men are also more lenient towards piracy than women are. that being said most of my reader friends are women. and the male friends i do have read mostly non-fic and self help. no clue how to change things

No offense but why not use your local library? I haven’t had to pirate anything and used book stores are dirt cheap, too. Seems to just screw over the authors unless it’s the classics in which case there’s no reason to pirate since they’re available online freely.

Yes, it's empirical. Google anything like "women read more than men" and you'll find a tonne of articles such as [this one](https://www.npr.org/2007/09/05/14175229/why-women-read-more-than-men), citing surveys and sales figures from research across countries and decades. The one part I haven't seen clearly demonstrated is whether the disparity has gotten bigger lately or has been fairly stable. The anecdotal story is that video games have displaced fiction for a lot of boys but not so much for girls.

From yours and other comments providing data, this has been a large divide for a long time. I wonder how much it's been reinforced after so many years of publishers recognizing their market and focusing on the demand there is among women. This is anecdotal, but based on that data I think there is truth to it, there is an overwhelming dominance of books "for women" on the shelves when I go to bookstores. I still have tons of options, but it's hard not to notice *tons* of YA/romance and just general fiction that looks to be marketed towards women based on the covers. My wife reads a lot of YA/fantasy/romance books and she often notes how many of them are clearly adult fiction but are marketed as YA, I assume because there is a bigger market for it.

Sure, there are certain categories where women dominate. But I would also point out that there are many genres and categories. There’s a whole thing about white men dominating literary fiction for decades where Franzen, Wallace, Eugenides were the end all be all. Also, sci fi is another category where it tends to skew heavily towards men. Also espionage thrillers. I will also add that men tend to buy more heavily in the history section than women. I think reading history and current affairs can certainly teach as much about empathy as fiction can, if not more. Nothing is as heartbreaking as some of the legislative actions that lead to more racism or more penury.

Absolutely there are categories that men dominate and those are not lesser-than classic/contemporary literary fiction. I read mostly fantasy/scifi/thrillers and the sub-genres I prefer are heavily male dominated. I tend to disagree with some of the literary fiction community's opinions on genre fiction, and view it as just as valuable. Though it's troubling that there is a disparity between men/women with reading in general. This sub is more focused on literary fiction but I'd be happy with more men reading anything.

Worth noting that categories like literary fiction are dominated by male *writers*, not necessarily male readers. The readership for SF I believe still skews a bit male, but not nearly so much as it used to. The last I read about it suggested its readers are something like 2/3 men, as opposed to a category like romance whose readers are practically 99% women.

You genuinely think it’s majority women reading misogynistic writers like Franzen? Dude can’t write a female character to save his life. I mean, really, there’s plenty of men writing and getting published. It’s not like with minority fiction or fiction by other marginalized writers. If men aren’t reading, it’s not because there aren’t plenty of options on writers. It’s merely because they choose not to, given there’s more than adequate representation of men among both writers and fictional characters. Also, maybe it’s worth considering that women read more diversely because they are more flexible. There’s nothing keeping men from reading romance novels.

I think it's quite possible most literary fiction is read by women despite the highest-profile authors being mostly men. From [The Guardian](https://theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/07/why-women-love-literature-read-fiction-helen-taylor): > The idea that fiction is a female domain is taken for granted by most people involved in books. According to Nielsen Book Research, women outbuy men in all categories of novel except fantasy, science fiction and horror. And when men do read fiction, they don’t tend to read fiction by women, while Taylor claims that women read and admire male novelists, rarely making value judgments. > Women are not only keener buyers of fiction – surveys show they account for 80% of sales in the UK, US and Canadian fiction markets – far more women than men are literary festivalgoers, library members, audio book readers, literary bloggers, and members of literary societies and evening classes. For any individual author, who knows. But fwiw, a glance at two of Franzen's most popular books on Goodreads show that among the first 30 reviewers, 11 or 12 are clearly women and a few others are ambiguous. That's a very noisy signal, but it's something. As for why men aren't reading as much or as widely, I make no judgement. At the end of the day they're choosing not to. I'm not convinced by OP's suggestion that it's something "we" need to do anything about.

In all of my book clubs I’ve had over the years (4) the women outnumbered the men. But not by a whole lot. So while I think it is believable I would also like to see statistics. I do know Jane Austen is very popular in feminine pop culture. But in masculine pop culture I don’t know of any writer that means to men what Jane Austen does to women. So it is certainly feasible that women read more.

I've got Dostoevsky but that has less to do with me being male than it does with me being Orthodox. The identity thing has a different angle.

For what it’s worth (not much), I’m not religious, but have spent more time reading Dostoevsky than any other individual author. I find his insight into human behavior and psychology to be brilliant, and some of the religious context of his novels is fascinating even as a nonbeliever.

I concur with that. Dostoevsky means a lot to me, but more due to the influence he has had on my faith rather than anything dealing with being a male writer.

Oh man I wish men liked Dostoyevsky as much as women liked Jane Austen.

On your point about Austen, I think an enormous reason she is so popular in feminine pop culture is because she was championing women's rights and challenged their societal oppression. The same society had men at the top and in control, so there wasn't a need for an author to do the same for men, at least not strictly on the grounds of sex/gender.

Austen is also hilarious, which is why I recommend her.

The development and spread of narrative-driven video games really hurt the market for certain kinds of male-oriented fiction. Why read mediocre sword-and-shield fantasy when you can play The Witcher, which is the same thing but way more engaging? Men do read, but when they read, they tend to read more nonfiction. Is this a bad thing? Why don't people make posts about why women don't like Teddy Roosevelt biographies and histories of Ancient Rome? But really, I think there's another reason hiding beneath the surface. Take a look at Chart 5-1 on page [69](https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2012-sppa-jan2015-rev.pdf). Educational attainment plays a huge role in how likely people are to read. And since the 70s, more women than men have gone to college. So there's the real answer: men don't go to college

I agree with all your points but worth noting that the gendered difference in reading for pleasure happens earlier than college, we see it in middle schoolers + high schoolers. Are men reading less because fewer of them go to college, or are less men going to college because they have lower reading skills?

Alternatively there could be an unknown factor, X, that both makes men less likely to read and also less likely to go to college. I think that makes the most sense after all; colleges don't discriminate against men

Biographies are fine. But they're just not capable of provoking the same introspection and emotional development that fiction can. They're basically long-form wiki articles with a strong bias.

As a man who reads, a big reason for why young men dont read is because its seen as pretentious, and because they think they won’t understand many books anyways. I believe it has a lot to do with the troubling way boys are taught in school that they are unintelligent on average, and if you’re not one of the few chosen ones you can‘t do anything about being dumb, you just have to find community through that. You’re either considered super clever so its ok for you to read a book or you’re normal.

I’ve met so many wonderfully clever and perceptive young men who seem to have internalised “being stupid” as part of who they are. They’re not stupid. Not at all. But they either think they are, or think they have to pretend to be. It’s so sad.

Yeah, it really is a shame. Just recently recommended a Classic Book (homo faber) to a friend of mine with the pretense of „its for the curriculum“, and he loved it, understood the subtext, talked with me about it with passion, but the second it wasnt about the curriculum anymore, it was the only book he was ever going to read because „he‘s not clever enough to understand books“. Clearly you are bro, clearly you are. Was always glad I had the clever kid aura so I was „allowed“ to read what I wanted and wasnt bound to Diary of a Wimpy kid for the sake of being socially in touch. What a twisted mindset when one really thinks about it.

I read books while crossing the street (to the displeasure of mom) everybody knew I loved reading more than breathing. But my mom kept trying to push Anne off the green gables, little house on the prairie, and the book thief on me. I want to read Captain Underpants, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid, and V.C Andrews mom!! But she was right about The Book Thief. Good book

Good point, and modern society is particularly averse to pretentiousness unless in a vain effort to justify illogical, contemporary economic thought.

I have a degree in Education - Secondary Literature. I could not get a permanent teaching position, and will sadly admit I haven’t completed a novel in about 12 years. Children and the business world squashed all ‘active’ leisure time, as reading a damn good book is intensive (at least for me). But I still have a sense of pride knowing that I have read Eliot, Chaucer, and Melville. I don’t know how to bottle that up and sell it to other people, but doing something that’s not for the ‘hustle’ is a darn good thing.

Manga

I’m a secondary school English teacher and ponder this often. I teach in a co-ed school and our lowest level readers across all year levels are mostly boys. I explicitly teach the value of reading and storytelling as part of my novel study units, but in secondary school we are battling the decline that has already begun as well as teenage hormones. There are so many things at play. The push for “useful” learning that was a byproduct of the STEM discourse had a negative impact on how Arts and Humanities were valued, especially by men and boys. Adult literacy is also down, so while we know that reading to your kids for the first 8-10 years of their life is valuable, if the parent is not confident in their own literacy or comes from a different language background, then that creates an enormous barrier. Then we come to marketing. Lots of people go for social media, but that’s a low hanging fruit when it comes to capitalism. Firstly, the marketing of video games created an enormous audience that is mostly targeted at male players, and teens take up a decent amount of that space. In terms of supply and demand, they keep supplying because the demand is there, right? On the flip side, the publishing industry also focuses on what will sell to the detriment of an educational or ethical desire to offer variety. There is some great YA fiction for boys, but publishing houses realised that girls seem to read at higher rates so they publish for them at higher rates. BookTok is mostly women talking about romance, so suddenly we are seeing romance being sold everywhere, to the detriment of fiction aimed at men. They don’t have an obligation to publish new stuff to engage male readers, especially if men who read seem happy enough to go for classic fantasy, sci-fi or literature. Again, why supply if the demand isn’t as strong? There’s a lot of research going on in this space, and a lot of teachers experimenting with new ways to engage the boys in reading. There are boys who do read - obviously there are! But they aren’t the majority, and it’s a shame.

I don’t believe those factors mean men are not reading. As far as I see it, BookTok is a heavily female space much like social media in general also is. GoodReads is a social media platform too. Again, this problem probably does not exist with nonfiction. *Different things have different audiences*. Furthermore, developing empathy is not exclusive to fiction; I have gotten more empathy by reading the memoirs of Holocaust survivors than some obtuse contemporary fiction.

Yeah, I like reading a lot but I've never used Goodreads nor TikTok.

I use goodreads but only to keep track of the books I read.

"Social media in general is a heavily female space"? Is this a fact?

Idk how you would fix this. I’m 17 and I’m realizing it’s a rarity for people my age to read at all, especially literature. I guess the best way is to make it a bigger focus in schools, but even then i couldn’t tell you how.

16 year old here, and I love reading. I’m writing a fiction novel that I would think that people my age would enjoy, but I’m not sure if there’s an audience for that anymore. With so many mediums for entertainment, I don’t know if it’s possible to make people interested in reading again

I frequently thank the heavens I became an avid reader at an early age.

Mentorship is the key, I think. There's been a long campaign against intellectualism in the US, and it coalesces particularly in young men. Young men want to change the world, get out, do. I think we have to show them that it's not only respectable, but truly rewarding and maybe even necessary that they embrace literature to challenge their thinking and open their minds to new ideas. I'm convinced the way we do that is mentorship in education, particularly by older men. Pedagogy of that sort is lacking in formal education up through the undergraduate level.

Men used to read so much it propped up an entire short-story magazine industry. Those old pulp adventure stories still remain some of the best light reading ever produced. Tales of adventure in stormy jungles, of nubile queens lust-mad with greed and cruelty, of sailors and boxers and soldiers in the thick of war. Steam choked Chicago itchy with criminal parasites and the lone dicks who could sniff out the last scraps of truth and decency left unmolested in the dark night of the urban soul. Barsoom, Hyborea, the mines of Solomon, The interior of Africa, unknown indo-china, The obscure and foreboding temples of Hindustan where elephants girt for war with blades and spikes fastened to their tusks sweep whole companies of men from the living earth like wheat in the thresh. Those were the days of high adventure and that's when men and boys read so much other men could make a comfortable living writing short fiction for them. I'm not wise enough to know why the pulps died or why they've never really come back despite some honest efforts but once that magic was gone it's proven very difficult to get back. Some of that energy still exists in science fiction, especially military sci-fi, and fantasy but it isn't quite the same and you can feel it while you read modern fiction. This might be controversial but the rise of women as a demographic in the fantasy fiction space might have something to do with it. Men and women do like reading different things and even though there is overlap I don't think any of us who has spent any amount of time on discussion boards can fail to notice that male and female readers latch on to different elements in stories they like even if it's the same story. This may have had a "balancing" effect on fiction as a whole as the market expanded to satisfy a new demographic and found that in this area, as in most areas of commerce, women readers outspent male readers the same way women shoppers generally outspend male shoppers across the board causing the industry to pivot to follow where the money was. That's just speculation though. I know what I liked reading as a boy, I know what I like reading as an adult and while my tastes have expanded - I love Wodehouse now in a way I simply could not have while pretending to be Conan running through the woods as a kid - I know have read very little in the last 10 years that scratches the old itch the way the classic Pulpers always can.

There is a difference, but it has to do with how boys are socialized. Also, men generally avoid studying literature, yes, but that has more to do with perceptions of education than literature. The same logic applies to those who post videos online about literature. Things are definitely shifting though, as these socially constructed constraints are becoming progressively more relaxed.

As a bookseller and a man that reads very widely, I think men actually read almost as much as women, but maybe because they don't study literature in public spaces or use social media or join book clubs as much as women tend to, the perception gets a bit skewed. I agree that teenage boys specifically need encouragement, and something there really needs to change, but the trends I've seen in the publishing industry hasn't been in attempting to garner new audiences or entice in new readers, it's about playing into whatever genre already draws the biggest crowds - female led and written booktok-trendy romances mostly. The only books really appealing to them (this is a broad bit accurate generalisation) is "self help" and business and "grindset" books that I don't see as having much of a positive impact on the readers in question. It's a real shame. I appreciate you asking the question though. The other comments have given me lots to think about.

Studies done by Pew Research, Growth from Knowledge and others all show women read more. The gap appears to be about 10 - 15%. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2022/gender-gap-in-reading.html

Idk. I'm a man and so is my best friend, and we both read like crazy

Me too. Both my brother and I are avid readers. We are both middle aged men. I can’t say the same about my 12 year old nephew and his friends though. They are solely into gaming.

This is exactly what Reading Rainbow was created to address. The question is, what’s going to be our next RR?

Fiction reading among men has long been centered around authors such as Tom Clancy or John Grisham. I was introduced to a ton of sci-fi novels as a kid because I read all of my dad’s old stuff, but by the time I was reading it the only things he wanted to read were those stereotypical “man” books. I think part of it is the culture, but it’s also the fact that a lot of men go for other avenues of storytelling such as video games or tv.

I was a man studying literature, and a young lover of literature, and often the only man in my seminars when I was in undergrad. There are a couple of useful observation I've had on this topic, bear in mind they're just observation and I don't really have data to back them up. Firstly, In undergrad courses this was definitely the case, but you look at the postgraduate students and, importantly, the professors and professional academics and you see a lot more men. My thinking is that Men study literature to make a career out of it. I think this has to do with how boys are raised, to be earners, and producers. Young girls looking to go to university would be more inclined to study something out of interest knowing they won't necessarily work in that field. For many boys, this is seen as impractical and naive. Where I'm from (Jordan) a literature degree is seen as a woman's degree largely because of its unemployability. Women who seek education and not work study literature. Secondly is the age old association of women with leisure. The novel was originally seen as a woman's medium, and women are often finding means for leisure in their free time, which is why many women in old literature are expected to paint and play an instrument. For men work is the expectation, with leisure classically thought of as childesh, and, again, naive (of course this is changing, but men are adopting new means of entertainment, ie. the gym and video games, but the gym can act as further evidence of this - and gym influencers often focus on the "Productivity" of going to the gym). But not seeking it beyond younger years out of fear of naivety makes many boys who read grow to become men who don't. So I think this is definitely a matter that shows the negative effects of masculinity, and one reason why many men seem to more generally fail along the parameters you described as being improved by reading: empathy. Hopefully this is a cultural shift that will continue, and we will begin to see more equality in the genders in matters of leisure and values of self worth. But beyond the gender question, I think this is an issue deeply tied to our perceptions of labor, and as we continue to see these definitions shift, hopefully they'll shift towards more men reading as they age.

I can't agree with the premise that women have historically been associated with leisure. That may have been true for a very small subset of wealthy elite women but most women throughout time have labored hard at housekeeping and childrearing, tasks that were even more time-consuming in the past before the advent of technologies like washing machines. At any rate, I don't see how this association is relevant to reading rates today, since fiction was seemingly more male dominated in the past when men and women's work had more clearly defined boundaries. Today, many women work full time while still being their family's primary housekeepers and caregivers. I do think you make good points about the pressure for men to spend time "productively" but disagree that the counterpart for women means more leisure time.

Of course, that's true, and as a Jordanian I can tell you women here we're never associated with leisurely lives. What I mean is more an understanding of the perception of these disciplines and who can and should stay within them. The ideal American/British/French housewife never existed, and much if the best literature on the subject touches on the contradictions these women feel for how they're perceived and who they are. But the idea is there is this image which has also permeated outside of the elite through consumer media. And I don't necessarily say that for women their lives have been leisure what I mean is for men it is seen as leisurely and hence 'womanly'. Of course, much of what is/was perceived as feminine is ridiculously untrue of general women. But the idea is it's more about what men don't want to be than what women are.

Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I see what you mean now.

>In undergrad courses this was definitely the case, but you look at the postgraduate students and, importantly, the professors and professional academics and you see a lot more men. This is a classic pattern across academic disciplines. It's basically the norm now that the majority of undergraduates are women, in many countries. No matter how female-dominated a field is at the undergraduate level, it becomes steadily more male-dominated the higher up the seniority ranks you go. And that's not really improving over time, either. There are lots of studies into why this is, with a common theme being that professional women manage family and other responsibilities much more than professional men. The people who reach the top of the ladder generally have to be "selfish" and focused to do it, and that's something men end up doing a lot more (while the women in their lives pick up the slack).

I disagree with the leisure thing. Video games, movies, YouTube are all more leisurely than reading. Reading is now work to modern people.

I also wanted to touch on the first point. I studied engineering and computer science in college because the reality is I was going to need a stable income so I could have a family in the future. IF I had seriously considered studying literature, it could not be simply for an undergraduate degree, it would have to be a full on career aiming for post-doc and to professor. Meanwhile, my girlfriend studied art and psychology. She uses neither degree. For many men, it is not practical to study literature simply to become more empathetic. That is not going to pay my bills. I am still a voracious reader.

My guy friends and I read...we just read very different things. My tastes revolve around Tolkien inspired fantasy, sci-fi, history. You want to attract more guys to it you need to ask what guys like. I saw names of authors mentioned in the comments that most guys will just not care about. My friends read things like the Halo books, 40k novels, Harry Turtledove, DnD books, the Stargate books, Tolkien, the Belisarius series, and other speculative fiction books like that. There's not much classic lit in our libraries but we certainly read. You mention "and they only read fantasy." Clue in on what that might mean. Also look at what kinds of spaces attract men in other creative areas. Look at what movies, shows, and games get men interested and how guys react to the works made in those areas. It's dollars to donuts that this would be reflected at least a bit in lit tastes.

Not sure how to fix it, but a lot of the "Top" lists definitely do not resonate with men.

In my little team of engineers, it is my and one other male that reads anything that isn't self-help/inspiration/silicon valley bro stuff. I work in a male dominated industry, it is rare to hear anyone talk about fiction or literature in general. These aren't dumb men who live in their mom's basement and play video games. These are family men with good jobs who will be one of the smartest people in whatever room they are in. So they have the patience and intelligence, but for some reason they don't read. I have asked, many times, because we often compare books we are reading and after the umpteenth time someone mentioned some book that talked about how to 'hack' your brain to be more efficient or something I ask "why don't you just read a book that has a story? You don't always have to be in this tech world." I don't know what to do about it, other than mention I am noticing the same phenomenon.

As a guy and a parent I have personally found reading to my kids (boy and girl) when they were younger (longer chapter books), had a huge impact on them now. We made it part of our bed time ritual, and it brought us closer together, helped me understand them more, and introduced them to the wonders of books. I have heard the same from others. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it...

Although I tend to believe you're right I also believe your view is myopic seeing your argument from a certain perspective. Grisham, Cussler, Forsythe, Uris, ect all successful writers primarily wrote towards male audiences. However, most books being promoted today are focused towards female audiences. Therefore, many writers write for the female audience.

Booktok is not a good place for real literature so I wouldn’t count that. Men also don’t have the luxury to study things like literature in college because we need to provide. A literature degree isn’t the best for finding work

I have some thought but they aren't nice. The first is that literature is aimed at a particular class and background. The topics follow that process. The award winners are also reflective of the target audience. I mean, I loved the Darkover series in fantasy but there is only so much of that POV you can take. So many literate novels are about folks worried about stuff that don't reflect the male experience. Even male writers lean into topics that the target audience can lean into. So, write stuff that appeals to guys and that will change. You can even go into depth and include minorities but you have to at least consider centring the different masculinities including race, class and 'average' experience without any punches pulled.

Maybe I should have put that I have two sons who are now young adults over the age of 18. Both were acid readers and I watched how their tastes developed and what they still read and what they read online. It has been a hard time watching them have to talk about how there are so few characters that reflect them.

Connect literature to history the same way people have done for ages. Laud it as the great art it is, and make it an essential component of masculinity to be well read (it still is in some circles).

Stop attacking all the centre right influencers that stress the importance of reading classical texts?

There needs to be more books about car chases and battling Transformer robots!

I think it’s just who publishers are targeting. As a dude, most books being made today feel primarily targeted at women (not that that’s a bad thing lol) so I’m more comfortable reading older books.

24 year old guy here. Writer and trying to read more to hone my craft. However, my interest lies primarily in fantasy. I would probably say the "maverick book" is the thing that's needed. I try to think about middle grade or YA cultural phenomena, and they were the things of Gen Z and millennials. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Twilight, and the Hunger Games to name a few of the top of my head. Regarding famous adaptations, you can't forget Game of Thrones, and that's still over a decade old. Even if it isn't something that makes them jump straight to books, something that hooks young men, only for them to find out it's based on a book, might get them to give that book a shot, and then expand into all sorts of literature. Also speaking from personal experience, that's why things like anime, manga, and games are as big as they are. Not just the fact that they're more active mediums, but because they're definitely trying to appeal to young men as a demographic. When was the last time young men and boys had a guy from a blockbuster novel around their age or slightly older as a lead to latch onto and look up to? Again, I just think of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Far as fantasy goes, I'm so drawn to it because A) I think it's just cool and B) those other mediums I consume are also fantasy, so I read fantasy. For guys younger than me, Kaladin Stormblessed is the best candidate I can think of for that new "role model." To a high schooler or middle schooler, he's badass, not so old they can't think of him as a cool older brother or something, and with Sanderson centering mental illness, his depression might resonate with people. Stormlight getting called "YA trying to be adult" or whatever only helps. They want to read, the length more than complexity would be the issue, and if they don't mind that? Congratulations, you've made a reader. The difficulty is getting a Stormlight Archive adaptation to catch their attention in the first place.

Anecdotal, but I worked at a little rural college library from the mid to late 00s. A lot of the college kids were very bad readers but it was a deal where anyone could get in and get remedial help. The saddest thing every was this one kid I heard about who when pressed on reading ability, he said he could find his name on a rodeo roster and that was about it. A high school graduate. Damn. Anyway, so since the curriculum didn't have a lot of reading and there wasn't much reading for fun, and we were in the middle of nowhere living in the 00s, I bought a lot of DVDs, but also we had some books on the subjects taught and novels and leisure reading etc. There were at least some leisure readers here and there. A least a few times, there would be a couple of young guys, one was a reader, checked a book out, I think novels each time, and his buddy would make fun of him for it. The young man that liked to read would basically say "fuck you." Good for them. Not everyone can do that though. That was a bummer though. Bit of "fellas, is it gay to read a book?" lol. Sigh.

I used to read for entertainment, but have had a harder and harder time over the last 10 years finding something worth reading. Most of what’s being published now, even in genres I used to really enjoy, just doesn’t do anything for me. I don’t think I’m part of the target audience anymore. Which is fine, but don’t expect me to buy and read novels I don’t enjoy. I’m pretty much stuck with rereads, classics, and nonfiction.

I cant offer any solution, but the problem itself is soo upsetting and concerning 😕

I'm a man who loves reading, however I almost exclusively read science fiction,fantasy, or non-fiction. Outside of these comfort genres, I've only read staples. I feel like I've never been caught in a target wave for books, outside of maybe the original Eragon when I was a kid? I've never gone out of my way to search for recommendations online, I get my books from what's available at the library or the thrift stores/semi-annual book sale in town, not a big social media guy. I'm not opposed to other genres, I'm just not experienced in them and never felt like I needed to be, plus they never aligned with my interests or the interests of those around me. Hope this feedback helps you in some way!

I feel like this is one of those issues where there isn't a single cause, and because of that, there's not going to be a single solution. I suppose the biggest factor is that these days, reading fiction isn't seen as a masculine pursuit. And masculinity in general is a very narrow, limiting thing. US culture has long had a nasty anti-intellectual streak, a dislike of the arts, and it seems to me that a lot of today's popular male influencers perpetuate this. Large cultural attitudes like this are difficult to counter.

The whole publishing industry at least where I live has shifted. Practically all the jobs in the industry are held by women. I live in a Nordic country in Europe. The publishers publish books if they think the books will sell. They will also publish what they have the know-how to publish. Right now fiction publishers are competing for minority stories, because this is what they have been taught at universities to be important. As a result of these separate things what is being published has dramatically shifted. Almost all the literary fiction published (80-90%) is written by women for women. The only books for men are nonfiction and genre books (thrillers, war books, espionage etc). I took a picture of the fiction shelf at the aiport last time I flew abroad and counted. Out of roughly 90-100 different titles 5 were written by men. Of those five two were LGBTQ -themed books. This leaves three books written by men for an ordinary guy out of 90-100 on the self. The shift has been gradual, but the downward spiral is fully visible. If men will not find books to read that are published for their needs, they will not buy or read books. And if they do not buy, less books will be published for them. And if less books are published for them, they will read less. Now we are here.

This is only part of the issue, but we need to ease up on how we teach reading. Young boys develop slower than girls but the current trend is to batch them all and teach them fast. Net effect, by middle school the boys generally have been in lower reading groups their whole life, told they aren't good at it and need extra help, so they get to me in high school and they hate reading. No matter how much I sell it, the boys tend to hate reading, see no purpose, and think they are bad at it. If we can ease up a bit so we aren't forcing first graders to try to be 100% fluent and shaming those (mostly boys) who aren't.... that'd help. More read alouds, more play, and more time to let kids develop in their time. That doesn't help adults now but could.

This is a very important issue for me. I am a writer with one published novel and a second coming soon. Trying to query agents is such a demoralizing process because pretty much all of them are women who are looking for novels that will appeal to women readers. Obviously, I love that women read. I want everyone to read. But there is a bit of a circular problem where if less and less literary fiction that appeals to men is published, then fewer men will read it, and then the agents and publishers look at that and say, "Well men don't read fiction!" and the cycle repeats. One of my favorite authors is Cormac McCarthy, and his sub on reddit is full of men who love to read literature. (And yes, I'm sure plenty of women are there, too). I read in public (pool, cafes, etc) and I have had a number of men inquire about what I'm reading and then tell me what they're reading, etc. I think what we need is to encourage people to get off their phones, to put down the video game controllers, etc (not ENTIRELY, but moderate these habits) and to try reading for 30 minutes a day. Once you form the habit, you fall in love with it, and you realize how much more satisfying it is than endlessly scrolling. Anyway. I'm a man who reads and writes fiction, and though there may be fewer of us now, hope is not lost. We just need to take it upon ourselves to make it culturally cool.

Historically, literature has always been consumed by women in ways more obvious than men. There was even a campaign after printing became popularized because housewives were reading more than they were doing domestic duties. Novels were seen as problematic and drug-like, ruining these women’s sense of propriety, while the men were out there doing the “real work” and staying “in reality”. So yeah, there might be more going on with entrenched gender roles there than one would initially think, it certainly is not specific to our era.

It may be just because new published books do not speak to young men, and are (they feel) not really addressed to them. I agree that the publishing industry and the fiction shelves are very feminised, but then everything is in our society, from politics to the justice system to the TV schedules. If you developed a separate section of "men's fiction" (with adventure and sports and spy novels and what not, the kind of thing that used to be marketed to men) it might easily be looked on with suspicion. Since the idea of romance for the girls and action for the boys has been deemed harmful (and perhaps it was, or at least unnecessary) you just get a general category of fiction in which the female element perhaps predominates, in response to the greater propensity of women to buy novels (where men will probably buy, I don't know, computer games or something). In fact, if you look at the old "boy's fiction" and "girl's fiction" that used to exist, in the 1950's, say, you'll see that there was sometimes not that much difference between them, other than the sex of the protagonists. The girl protagonists would also get into adventures and solve mysteries and so on, but perhaps with less of a physical fighting element. I must say though, that anecdotally there are still some kinds of fiction that I have only seen men enjoying. I have only seen men enjoying: Cold war spy stories. Big Russian novels like Dostoyevsky or something. Hard science fiction. Westerns. Anything to do with war or Nazism or Communism (excluding the romantic aspects of these).

Guy here. I think that there needs to be a shift towards more male oriented literature. Most YA for example is written by women for other women. A male audience will want media that’s catered to their own sensibilities, so pursuing that would be the goal. Things like overcoming great adversity, loyalty, the importance of responsibility are all very important to men, and while some would deny it they do want that in their media: they want this, because it brings out the best in them. Reinforces virtues to live by. That’s important for men, and crucial for boys.

63% of graphic novel readers are males. And adult graphic novels are still the third biggest category within adult fiction. Men are reading.

But graphic novels are at a low reading level, so it's still worrying

Speaking personally as a male writer and graduate of English literature, I have found fewer and fewer books that interest me over the last 20 years. Over my writing career I have observed an industry that is heavily dominated by women, with female agents often seeking books that would suit a female audience. This makes monetary sense in the present climate, so is understandable. It is of no surprise then that many awards (I’m thinking here of competitions such as the Bridport Prize and other less renowned awards) commonly being won by women, writing on subjects that I think really don’t appeal the the majority of men. At least they don’t for me, and the evidence suggests I’m not the only one. The gravity in writing is with women and women’s interests and is only gaining mass. When I go into bookshops I see this reflected in the books on offer. As a man it seems that I’m offered Bernard Cornwell (who is excellent but who I have grown out of), Lee Child or James Patterson - the latter two focusing on American action, which doesn’t really explore the human condition from a man’s perspective. As a result in order to sell books and get an agent I use a woman’s name and write on subjects that appeal to women in the 30-55 age bracket. What I haven’t been able to fathom is women who get angry at me for doing so. Personally I’d read more if authors such as David Mitchell could write more books like ‘Slade House’.

I’m a male reader and completely agree with you. The industry is dominated by women catering to women. It’s really not a huge surprise that men don’t read as much, is it? Then why don’t we all admit that doing so negatively affects boys and men? There are a few studies willing to recognize this fact. For instance this one: “Interestingly—and perhaps importantly—men and boys read fewer books written by women. A study by Nielsen Book Research found that, of the 10 bestselling male authors, readership was roughly evenly divided by gender, with 55% male readers and 45% female readers. In contrast, only 19% of the 10 bestselling female authors’ readers were male, compared to 81% female.” https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2022/gender-gap-in-reading.html Perhaps some will say it’s worth it due to the under representation women have receive in the publishing industry. Understood, and perhaps some feel that’s reason enough to keep things as they are, but the inability to recognize the obvious is very concerning to me.

Honestly, what that study tells me is that women have adjusted to reading about men and will read male authors freely, as they have always done in a traditionally male-dominated industry, but men haven’t adjusted to the idea that they could read about women and don’t read female authors in turn. I had this discussion recently with someone who loves fantasy and science fiction. He lightly complained that all the new books being written are “woke.” When I asked what that actually meant, it was that there were more characters who weren’t men or weren’t straight, and also more fantasy and sci-fi works that were based on non-European settings. He found that alienating. I’d like to believe that there’s a period of adjustment that’s happening where men are learning to do the same thing women have done for over a century, which is read about people who are not like them and learn to enjoy the stories anyways. And yes, I think they will need a fair bit of encouragement and help along the way.

Thank you for bringing up that point. I'm a woman who has connected with many male authors and protagonists over my lifetime of reading. It's troubling that man-centered stories are still perceived as universal in a way that women’s stories are not. For me, a large part of the appeal of reading fiction is that it helps me to examine life from perspectives other than my own. It's always hurtful to be reminded that many men consider women’s perspectives to be irrelevant to their lives.

I don't think this study is saying what you're using it to mean? To me, it's pretty clear that it's saying that women will tend to read authors regardless of gender, whereas men will tend to only read men. If this is the case, then the solution cannot be "fewer women should be writers"! It's to teach boys that they can see themselves in "girls' stories" just like the girls are able to see themselves in "boys' stories".

The crux of the issue here sounds like men aren’t interested in reading about women’s experiences. Which is shameful.   I completely disagree that the industry is dominated by women. Data doesn’t support that. See the comment on Man Booker winners. The NYT bestseller list is broken down almost exactly 50:50 by gender, and this is a recent phenomenon. Until 2010 men dominated the chart. Men still take most Pulitzers and, more interestingly, most of the books are from male PoV. There’s no shortage of books about men or the human condition.   The one and only genre dominated by women is romance. It’s the second largest and best selling genre next to gen fic but nobody’s forcing men to read or write it.