Writing recently at Dazed magazine online , Georgina Elliott asked “Why don’t straight men read novels?” I am a straight man, middle-aged to boot, who does read novels, lots of them, so I found the question somewhat alienating, but at the same time, not surprising. It’s not news to me that women buy the vast majority of books in the U.S.
— somewhere around 80% of the total — so I was aware that men flat out don’t read as many books as women. But I hadn’t considered that it was a problem of novels specifically that men aren’t reading. If we’re talking about the kinds of novels that we broadly call “literary,” the truth is that very few people read these books, period.
Writing in Granta , literary critic Christian Lorentzen relates that an editor at an independent publisher estimated that there are approximately 20,000 people in the country who read literary fiction. If only 20,000 people are reading literary fiction, and 80% of them are women, that means only 4,000 men are reading those books nationwide. If that number is accurate, I feel like I know a disproportionate number of them, but that would probably be the case given the crowds I run with, including here, where men are sending me their list of five recent reads, most of which contain novels, all the time.
At Dazed, Elliott explores various theories as to why men aren’t reading novels, including that men are not socialized to read as much as women, lacking reading role models in other men. Ell.