> I can still power through novels pretty quickly when they click for me, but I find myself falling back on reliable authors and (sub)genres, because so much of what generates critical buzz these days just isn’t much fun, at least for me.
Hear, hear!
I've been a reader on and off for the past few years and I think it really depends on some factor that I couldn't describe except through the word "fun". I don't think I've engaged much with "higher literature", and every time I feel the urge to read those works, it always comes down to the fact that a competent English speaker *should* know these things rather than me wanting to read them for their own sake. When I hit a book I really like though, I can speed through the whole thing (while admittedly often missing some important plot points).
I have created a list of "vegetables" for smart high schoolers (fair warning that I have not read more than a few of them; they are, after all, "vegetables"):
As Marshall McLuhan once said, “reading separates thought from feeling.” What I get out of that quote is the fun thing about reading is that you can became an expert in a subject without actually have to experience something. But I think of another McLuhan quote : “in our electric age knowledge supersedes experience. It is knowledge that got us to the moon not experience.” (But the flaw of that quote is nasa had experienced rocket scientists working for them at the time mainly Werner Von Braun)
I don't have much use for literature. As far as I can tell, there are books that people read for enjoyment, books that people read to gain information, and books that people read because they "ought" to. This last group is called literature, or perhaps literary. Their main function is as class markers - someone who can tell Proust from POTUS has had a proper, privileged upbringing, and is suitable for high status, high power, high income roles; someone who doesn't at least pretend to respect Proust and his oeuvre is not.
I've read the subset of officially-literary-works that I considered enjoyable, and learned Cliff-Notes versions of the others - which generally convinced me I was absolutely right not to actually read them. (Camus comes forcibly to mind in this context. Yuk.)
I can't tell without reading more than I want to whether this particular kerfluffle is about "literature" by my definition. ("Literary" need not imply literature.) But the preaching that people "ought" to read it suggests that it is. And as for boys of all ages who reject anything produced by a female - they are welcome to remain illiterate lest they be contaminated by a female primary school teacher, provided they don't then try to live off the earnings of their mother, girlfriend, or wife. Too many women have resorted to publishing under male pen names for me to have any sympathy for these poor suffering boy children. (And the boys generally liked the pseudonymous works just fine.)
Don't get me wrong. If some idjit wants to read only works by some subset of the population - or for that matter, only by LLMs, space aliens, or turnips, they are perfectly free to do so. (Good luck with the last 2 categories.) But I'm not going to coddle them.
In this context, we have the fuss over the Hugo awards some years past - googling something like "sad puppies" will probably find references. Some quantity of people, presumably male, wanted sci fi awards to only go to the type of sci fi they liked, and their tastes ran to adventure fiction of a sort often targeted to boys and young men. After a multi-year fuss, the result was a new set of sci fi awards, with the Hugos still catering to broader tastes, and the new ones catering to this subset.
I think there probably is a culture problem related to male exclusion and self-exclusion from female groups. I'm told that in typical schools these days, there's a mostly female group that help each other with school work and similar - only a subset of boys are welcome; unsurprisingly, they are the ones whose behaviour the girls prefer. The kids in those groups tend to do better in school than those outside these groups - who are mostly male. I don't have sources for this - a female friend (who has children) went on about this to me at some length, but didn't cite her information sources. But it seems plausible.
In the medium term, this will be self-correcting to an extent. Parents concerned about their sons' life chances will notice and start attempting to teach their sons how to behave to be welcomed in those groups. But we already have girls and women out-doing boys and men in most academic fields. And as someone who was raised in an era where jobs were designated as "for men" and "for women", I just can't bring myself to care. Some boys and men will make the cut, just fewer than girls and women - just as in my youth, a few girls and women - but far more men - got the academic and leadership roles in society. As long as we don't start designating job categories as "for women only", society is doing all it needs to do; providing equal opportunity is enough.
In this context, one might want to read _The Gates to Women's Country_, by Sheri Tepper. Maybe the solution to gender issues attempted in that book is the only one with much of a chance of working. I doubt that, but the novel did make me think.
I do wonder if the focus of and discussions within the publishing world are drifting towards identities characters embody and away from the type of novel I generally prefer to read, because I too have been bouncing off a lot of the highly praised books in recent years. I'm often hitting up top ten lists and the like looking for new things to try, and over the last six to eight years I feel like the synopsis from the recommender is something like "They're lesbian necromancers in outer space! What more do you need to know?"
Well, I'd like to know about the plot, the vibe, and the satisfaction I might get from reading it. And it turns out the lesbian necromancer book was a far-future locked room mystery with heavy bits of diplomacy and unknown forces pulling strings - I liked it! But most of the books on those lists I can tell immediately won't appeal to me at all, and my hit rate on the ones I do try is pretty low; I'm retreating more into the lower-brow version of genre fiction and away from the universally praised stuff.
(Although I just finished Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams, which hit every pleasure center in my brain, being set at a near-future tech conglomerate with extended diversions into Korean history and Umberto Eco-like conspiracies across decades. Something I also didn't get from the reviews I saw of it.)
Amusingly, the first Lesbian Necromancers Innnn Spaaaaace!!! book is one of the examples I was thinking about. I bounced off the first few chapters of that in a big way because it was trying _so_ _hard_ to establish how terribly dark and evil everyone was, to such a degree that I just couldn't take it seriously.
I hadn't heard of the Park book, I might give that a look.
I do recall those early chapters being a rough slog, now that you mention it. It's interesting because the rest of the book doesn't do much with it; the two characters reach a much more pleasant setting where they're semi-feral and people keep reacting to them with a bemused, "Wait, people still live on that miserable planet?" The early chapters have kind of just slipped from my recollection of the book.
My sardonic asides notwithstanding, I totally agree with your distaste for the "eat your vegetables" pitches.
Like you, I grew up thinking of reading as a fun thing. Full stop. Thanks so hard to my parents for bringing me up this way.
I do admit that I sometimes realize that when I talk about my favorite books, the authors are disproportionately male. But I think, over the past few years at least, that this might be getting corrected somewhat. Mostly through non-fiction, though, I also have to admit.
>>> This is… not a super inspiring pitch for reading as a way to spend one’s free time (and not just because I found Douglas Coupland super hard to take back in the day).
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt here, that you were being tongue-in-cheek with those supers. But I will be watching.
;)
Moving up rapidly on my list of pet peeves is people who say they are "super excited". About anything. In case you were wondering where this is coming from.
Ugh, I hate when I do that. What happened is that the parenthetical is a late addition to the sentence, on the third round of edits, and I doubt I ever read the whole sentence through to notice the double "super." (Meanwhile, I was doing things like changing one of two usages of "Paper of Record" that were multiple paragraphs apart to avoid that repetition...)
I don't think this particular genie is going back in the bottle. If it does, it will be for the same reason boys and men do many things - to impress a girl. Not to lay the responsibility for that at their feet, but that can be a major motivator. But perhaps the answer is not that men need to read more to expose themselves to those ideas, but that we need to find ways to present those ideas in more popular forms of content delivery.
That said - I should read more fiction. I've been on a nonfiction kick for a few years, lots of biographies of US presidents, and I've hit a few that just dragged. In the airport on vacation this summer, I picked up the Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. It was not my usual fare, even when I do read fiction - sci-fi adjacent, about a government agency working to integrate people plucked from the past into the present, but mostly focused on the relationship between the main character and her charge. I got hooked. It all sort of fell apart in the end, but it was beautifully written, and I flew through it.
I followed it up with a pair of early Murakami novels, and they were somewhere between not doing anything for me and actively turning me away. And I haven't read anything since. Maybe Santa will bring me something good....
I realized the other day that I've actually read multiple novels recently, and really ought to do a fiction review/recap post. I will note that I definitely enjoyed _The Mercy of Gods_ by "James S. A. Corey", though it's not really a complete story in its own right.
I generally agree with your critique of the approach. Do you agree that it is even a problem that NEEDS to be solved, even if the solution presented won't work? If so, I'm curious how you would try to make reading more competitive in the market for young men's free time.
A lesson I learned from a college English class: There are different types of power and influence to get someone to do something. You could put a gun to their head and coerce them under threat. This is akin to "read women's lit or you're a bad person". Then there is influencing people to make them genuinely WANT to do what you want them to do. This is higher order influence and often more effective in the long run. The author of the op-ed and the NYT crowd would do well to brainstorm on how to wield this higher-order influence to achieve their ends.
Well, as someone who make a portion of his income from selling pop-physics books, I do have a certain degree of self-interest, here...
Less flippantly, I'm a little conflicted about the question. That is, I feel like people not reading is a problem, but it's a little difficult to articulate what the concrete problem with that is, other than that I'm a confirmed Book Guy and it faintly offends my sensibilities. I'm not sure I can really put my finger on any specific bad consequence from it, though. I'm even less convinced that WHAT people read is a problem, as long as they're reading something with more socially redeeming qualities than, y'know, THE TURNER DIARIES.
> I can still power through novels pretty quickly when they click for me, but I find myself falling back on reliable authors and (sub)genres, because so much of what generates critical buzz these days just isn’t much fun, at least for me.
Hear, hear!
I've been a reader on and off for the past few years and I think it really depends on some factor that I couldn't describe except through the word "fun". I don't think I've engaged much with "higher literature", and every time I feel the urge to read those works, it always comes down to the fact that a competent English speaker *should* know these things rather than me wanting to read them for their own sake. When I hit a book I really like though, I can speed through the whole thing (while admittedly often missing some important plot points).
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have created a list of "vegetables" for smart high schoolers (fair warning that I have not read more than a few of them; they are, after all, "vegetables"):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KOCR-qSvx0vi0XU18pglwh84NVkk2i0DANdHeM4xMmo/edit?tab=t.0
You can remark on books I should add or remove.
As Marshall McLuhan once said, “reading separates thought from feeling.” What I get out of that quote is the fun thing about reading is that you can became an expert in a subject without actually have to experience something. But I think of another McLuhan quote : “in our electric age knowledge supersedes experience. It is knowledge that got us to the moon not experience.” (But the flaw of that quote is nasa had experienced rocket scientists working for them at the time mainly Werner Von Braun)
I don't have much use for literature. As far as I can tell, there are books that people read for enjoyment, books that people read to gain information, and books that people read because they "ought" to. This last group is called literature, or perhaps literary. Their main function is as class markers - someone who can tell Proust from POTUS has had a proper, privileged upbringing, and is suitable for high status, high power, high income roles; someone who doesn't at least pretend to respect Proust and his oeuvre is not.
I've read the subset of officially-literary-works that I considered enjoyable, and learned Cliff-Notes versions of the others - which generally convinced me I was absolutely right not to actually read them. (Camus comes forcibly to mind in this context. Yuk.)
I can't tell without reading more than I want to whether this particular kerfluffle is about "literature" by my definition. ("Literary" need not imply literature.) But the preaching that people "ought" to read it suggests that it is. And as for boys of all ages who reject anything produced by a female - they are welcome to remain illiterate lest they be contaminated by a female primary school teacher, provided they don't then try to live off the earnings of their mother, girlfriend, or wife. Too many women have resorted to publishing under male pen names for me to have any sympathy for these poor suffering boy children. (And the boys generally liked the pseudonymous works just fine.)
Don't get me wrong. If some idjit wants to read only works by some subset of the population - or for that matter, only by LLMs, space aliens, or turnips, they are perfectly free to do so. (Good luck with the last 2 categories.) But I'm not going to coddle them.
In this context, we have the fuss over the Hugo awards some years past - googling something like "sad puppies" will probably find references. Some quantity of people, presumably male, wanted sci fi awards to only go to the type of sci fi they liked, and their tastes ran to adventure fiction of a sort often targeted to boys and young men. After a multi-year fuss, the result was a new set of sci fi awards, with the Hugos still catering to broader tastes, and the new ones catering to this subset.
I think there probably is a culture problem related to male exclusion and self-exclusion from female groups. I'm told that in typical schools these days, there's a mostly female group that help each other with school work and similar - only a subset of boys are welcome; unsurprisingly, they are the ones whose behaviour the girls prefer. The kids in those groups tend to do better in school than those outside these groups - who are mostly male. I don't have sources for this - a female friend (who has children) went on about this to me at some length, but didn't cite her information sources. But it seems plausible.
In the medium term, this will be self-correcting to an extent. Parents concerned about their sons' life chances will notice and start attempting to teach their sons how to behave to be welcomed in those groups. But we already have girls and women out-doing boys and men in most academic fields. And as someone who was raised in an era where jobs were designated as "for men" and "for women", I just can't bring myself to care. Some boys and men will make the cut, just fewer than girls and women - just as in my youth, a few girls and women - but far more men - got the academic and leadership roles in society. As long as we don't start designating job categories as "for women only", society is doing all it needs to do; providing equal opportunity is enough.
In this context, one might want to read _The Gates to Women's Country_, by Sheri Tepper. Maybe the solution to gender issues attempted in that book is the only one with much of a chance of working. I doubt that, but the novel did make me think.
I do wonder if the focus of and discussions within the publishing world are drifting towards identities characters embody and away from the type of novel I generally prefer to read, because I too have been bouncing off a lot of the highly praised books in recent years. I'm often hitting up top ten lists and the like looking for new things to try, and over the last six to eight years I feel like the synopsis from the recommender is something like "They're lesbian necromancers in outer space! What more do you need to know?"
Well, I'd like to know about the plot, the vibe, and the satisfaction I might get from reading it. And it turns out the lesbian necromancer book was a far-future locked room mystery with heavy bits of diplomacy and unknown forces pulling strings - I liked it! But most of the books on those lists I can tell immediately won't appeal to me at all, and my hit rate on the ones I do try is pretty low; I'm retreating more into the lower-brow version of genre fiction and away from the universally praised stuff.
(Although I just finished Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams, which hit every pleasure center in my brain, being set at a near-future tech conglomerate with extended diversions into Korean history and Umberto Eco-like conspiracies across decades. Something I also didn't get from the reviews I saw of it.)
Amusingly, the first Lesbian Necromancers Innnn Spaaaaace!!! book is one of the examples I was thinking about. I bounced off the first few chapters of that in a big way because it was trying _so_ _hard_ to establish how terribly dark and evil everyone was, to such a degree that I just couldn't take it seriously.
I hadn't heard of the Park book, I might give that a look.
I do recall those early chapters being a rough slog, now that you mention it. It's interesting because the rest of the book doesn't do much with it; the two characters reach a much more pleasant setting where they're semi-feral and people keep reacting to them with a bemused, "Wait, people still live on that miserable planet?" The early chapters have kind of just slipped from my recollection of the book.
My sardonic asides notwithstanding, I totally agree with your distaste for the "eat your vegetables" pitches.
Like you, I grew up thinking of reading as a fun thing. Full stop. Thanks so hard to my parents for bringing me up this way.
I do admit that I sometimes realize that when I talk about my favorite books, the authors are disproportionately male. But I think, over the past few years at least, that this might be getting corrected somewhat. Mostly through non-fiction, though, I also have to admit.
>>> This is… not a super inspiring pitch for reading as a way to spend one’s free time (and not just because I found Douglas Coupland super hard to take back in the day).
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt here, that you were being tongue-in-cheek with those supers. But I will be watching.
;)
Moving up rapidly on my list of pet peeves is people who say they are "super excited". About anything. In case you were wondering where this is coming from.
Ugh, I hate when I do that. What happened is that the parenthetical is a late addition to the sentence, on the third round of edits, and I doubt I ever read the whole sentence through to notice the double "super." (Meanwhile, I was doing things like changing one of two usages of "Paper of Record" that were multiple paragraphs apart to avoid that repetition...)
Change the spelling to souper.
I don't think this particular genie is going back in the bottle. If it does, it will be for the same reason boys and men do many things - to impress a girl. Not to lay the responsibility for that at their feet, but that can be a major motivator. But perhaps the answer is not that men need to read more to expose themselves to those ideas, but that we need to find ways to present those ideas in more popular forms of content delivery.
That said - I should read more fiction. I've been on a nonfiction kick for a few years, lots of biographies of US presidents, and I've hit a few that just dragged. In the airport on vacation this summer, I picked up the Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. It was not my usual fare, even when I do read fiction - sci-fi adjacent, about a government agency working to integrate people plucked from the past into the present, but mostly focused on the relationship between the main character and her charge. I got hooked. It all sort of fell apart in the end, but it was beautifully written, and I flew through it.
I followed it up with a pair of early Murakami novels, and they were somewhere between not doing anything for me and actively turning me away. And I haven't read anything since. Maybe Santa will bring me something good....
I realized the other day that I've actually read multiple novels recently, and really ought to do a fiction review/recap post. I will note that I definitely enjoyed _The Mercy of Gods_ by "James S. A. Corey", though it's not really a complete story in its own right.
I generally agree with your critique of the approach. Do you agree that it is even a problem that NEEDS to be solved, even if the solution presented won't work? If so, I'm curious how you would try to make reading more competitive in the market for young men's free time.
A lesson I learned from a college English class: There are different types of power and influence to get someone to do something. You could put a gun to their head and coerce them under threat. This is akin to "read women's lit or you're a bad person". Then there is influencing people to make them genuinely WANT to do what you want them to do. This is higher order influence and often more effective in the long run. The author of the op-ed and the NYT crowd would do well to brainstorm on how to wield this higher-order influence to achieve their ends.
Well, as someone who make a portion of his income from selling pop-physics books, I do have a certain degree of self-interest, here...
Less flippantly, I'm a little conflicted about the question. That is, I feel like people not reading is a problem, but it's a little difficult to articulate what the concrete problem with that is, other than that I'm a confirmed Book Guy and it faintly offends my sensibilities. I'm not sure I can really put my finger on any specific bad consequence from it, though. I'm even less convinced that WHAT people read is a problem, as long as they're reading something with more socially redeeming qualities than, y'know, THE TURNER DIARIES.