On Books And Men That Read Them

Soapbox time

I am a reader. Always have been. I learned to read at a young age and when I arrived at kindergarten the teacher discovered that I was already a voracious reader so while my classmates were learning their ABCs, I was in the hall reading articles from Reader’s Digest.

In my half century of reading very few days have gone by where I didn’t have my nose in a book (or Kindle these days) for at least a part of the that day. It is nearly impossible for me to fall asleep at night without at least a little reading but if the book is good I will often read for an hour, thereby wiping out benefit of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Being not just a man but a man among men, my reading tastes are decidedly traditionally masculine. I am not interested in love stories that could be made into a Lifetime movie. I like books with heroism, war, monsters, challenges overcome. To be honest I still read the same kind of books I read as a kid, lots of sword and sorcery and sci fi.

For a very long time the art of writing, especially fiction, was a male dominated field. Names like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury were synonymous with high adventure and science fiction. Books by Ernest Hemmingway, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, were required reading for “serious readers”. Sure there were female authors, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen among others, but most authors were male.

On the other side of the equation, there were also lots of male readers. Having a library was considered to be a very masculine flex. From older men to younger boys reading about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, lots of guys read and lots of guys wrote.

That seems to have changed. A lot.

I use Goodreads to track my reading so my profile has 9 years of almost 500 finished books and nearly 300 “to-read” books. That is to say that the Goodreads algorithm has LOTS of data on which to base recommendations for me and yet….it sends me emails like this one of book giveaways it thinks I would like….

Despite having extensive records of hundreds of books I have read, am reading and want to read, I get recommended a list of “Book giveaways picked just for you” that consists of 8 books, 7 written by and for women, and one written by a guy named Chad Harbach titled “The Brightness” and it drips with estrogen based on the description….

Yep, that sounds like a book a guy with my reading habits would be excited for!

This is a trend that has been quietly building for years. I was reminded of it by a recent Faceberg post…

The post in question is a couple of years old but the key statistic here is that around 70% of “publishing professionals” are women, meaning they decide what books get published. I would guess that of the 30% that are men, a significant chunk are faggots and/or non-Whites with a grudge against White people.

Shockingly this has made it difficult for men to get published, although not impossible. From the New York Times article she referenced, The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone….

Male underrepresentation is an uncomfortable topic in a literary world otherwise highly attuned to such imbalances. In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking.

Like so much of modern “progressivism” it is hopelessly schizophrenic, with the author David J. Morris saying a few paragraphs later…

To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured. Furthermore, young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante.

Men don’t write or read and that is a problem! Also I think it is great! No wonder these people are all so hopelessly fucked up, their entire personality is built on endlessly shifting cognitive dissonance.

I have never heard of either Sally Rooney or Elena Ferrante but according to her wikipedia page Sally Rooney “has called herself both a feminist and a Marxist, and much of her work addresses related topics” and Ferrante is a pseudonym for an anonymous writer that may or may not even be a woman and the books I saw written by “her” are all targeted at women. Well that is exactly what young men are going to want to read, some feminist screeds by a Marxist and stories about women written by an anonymous woman/man.

Because the author is a crackpot, definitely liberal and I would suspect homosexual, he mentions Trump, Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan but clearly has no idea why young men are drawn to them and Nick Fuentes and to a lesser extent Tucker Carlson, despite the huge differences between all of those guys. You can figure this out just from this line…

This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.

Egad. Not only is the entire premise and plot of The Handmaid’s Tale preposterous and silly, the book itself is poorly written and frankly boring. I can read books by liberals who insert their politics into the story (and that is basically every liberal author) and still enjoy the book, but The Handmaid’s Tale is just awful literature. This seems like a good time to repost one of my favorite memes:

Fat chicks still show up to “protest” just about anything wearing those stupid outfits. Anyway…Making young men read The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t make them “better men” and it certainly doesn’t encourage them to read and to write. If anything it would have the opposite effect.

If you make young men eat bowls of vanilla ice cream mixed with a scoop of dog shit, it will not encourage them to eat ice cream later in life.

In a shocking revelation to some, (most) men like certain kinds of books and (most) women like very different kinds of books. As it just so happens, (most) men like books about swords and war and high adventure and masculine themes and rescuing damsels in distress, and no surprise a lot of men like to see the hero boning the rescued damsel. I find most sex scenes in fantasy and sci-fi to be juvenile and silly but to each his own. There is some crossover of course but this is mostly true and if you let people just be people it is how most of it will shake out.

It is true to an extent that books written by and for men have a cast that is male dominated. As an example, Frank Herbert’s Dune is centered on Paul Atreides. Sure his mom the Lady Jessica and his wife Chani are supporting characters but so are men like his father, Stilgar, Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck and others. The women in his life and in some cases the morally ambigious women like the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam serve a purpose in the books but the main character is always Paul. In other books like the Lord of the Rings there are very few female characters at all and their contribution is limited, especially compared to the movie adaptations.

I can see some of the criticism from women about the lack of female characters in older books but today? It isn’t even enough to have female characters. Any females in the book must be written in hushed, reverential tones. They must be the proverbial Mary Sue, with no flaws and infinite ability.

For centuries men have written books aimed at other men as their audience. Now that is officially Not OK. Even classics of literature are not immune to having Modern Women screeching in Goodreads reviews about their “problematic” treatment of women or race or homos. Books written by men, for men, that are not mostly fags scolding normal men for being normal men, are forbidden. Books written by women for women, even or especially ones that serve entirely as a vehicle to screech at men are acceptable and encouraged.

There are lots of (imo trashy) books written by women and for women. I don’t read those but I also don’t wish the authors ill. I certainly don’t read, or pretend to read, these books and then bitch about how they portray men in a review. If I were to read a book written by a black lesbian feminist Marxist, I would expect it to sound like a book written by a black lesbian feminist Marxist and recognize it was not written for me and would likely portray men in a negative light.

It is a tough question. Fictional books like science fiction and fantasy provide an imaginative escape for men who live in a less adventurous age. These novels gave rise to role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. In turn these table top and role-playing games have been largely supplanted by video games, where we see the same complaints about “representation” and “toxic masculinity” in video games that have traditionally been male dominated. Many of these games have world building that novelists should envy.

I don’t know that the “literary male” is ever going to come back. In a world full of electronic distractions it is difficult to sit down and read, I know I find my attention span isn’t what it used to be as there is always the siren’s call from my computer or phone. There are still guys writing books for guys but not like they used to. On the bright side we have hundreds of years of literature already written and accessible while you are sitting on the toilet. I find myself mostly reading older books, and re-reading old favorites. I can read Dune or The Godfather over and over and enjoy it more than most modern crap. Not to mention the thousands of non-fiction books written over the last century that are worth reading.

One thing is certain, making young men read The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t going to reverse the decline in the “literary male”.