second theory<\/a> places the blame on the publishing industry. Women dominate publishing, the argument goes \u2014 both as workers and as readers \u2014 and they\u2019ve steered the culture of books toward priorities many men don\u2019t connect with: identity, representation, trauma, social justice. Scan the tables of new releases in any independent bookstore and you\u2019ll see what critics mean: a glut of titles pitched toward female audiences and political narratives, with fewer and fewer books that men feel are speaking directly to them. This would also explain why women continue to read books even as their screen time has increased: online communities and appealing new titles have kept them turning pages. There\u2019s something to this critique, especially when you consider how poorly men are represented in the contemporary literary landscape, not in terms of raw numbers but in sensibility. And yet this explanation too feels incomplete.<\/p>\nAfter all, books that men could be reading, the novels of the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, most of them written by men, are still in print. No one is keeping Hemingway or Updike or Bellow a secret. And yet the appetite seems to have vanished. The problem isn\u2019t that men can\u2019t find books that speak to them \u2014 it\u2019s that they\u2019re no longer interested in looking.<\/p>\n
This brings us to the third theory: that something in male culture has shifted. That inner life \u2014 the emotional, reflective, and interpretive habits that literature nourishes \u2014 has come to be seen as antithetical to masculinity. That boys are raised to think of novels as feminine, soft, somehow suspect. There\u2019s truth here, too, and it\u2019s probably the most troubling of the explanations. But even this feels like only part of the picture.<\/p>\n
I think something far simpler is going on: I don\u2019t believe men have been shown what literature is for, and the blame for that is widely shared. High school syllabi too often chop novels into excerpts, avoid assigning whole books, and fail to give students the time to read independently and for pleasure. Books are not being presented to boys as sources of escape or adventure \u2014 on par with the coolest video game or most entertaining movie. The expanding field of online male influencers is not exactly portraying literature as something that might deepen, rather than diminish, one\u2019s masculinity. <\/p>\n
Yet literature offers something men desperately need: a way to process the complexities of their own experience. To understand what it means to be a son, a brother, a father, a lover, a friend. To hold in mind contradictory impulses and shifting roles. To be tender without being weak, open without being unmoored, confident without being cruel. These are not \u201cfemale\u201d qualities. They are human ones. But it\u2019s through literature that many of us learn how to inhabit them.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t about becoming a literary dandy who can summarize Proust at parties. Reading novels isn\u2019t for show. It makes you more empathetic, more emotionally agile, more capable of navigating the world\u2019s demands with subtlety and grace. <\/p>\n
But where to start? I\u2019ve got some recommendations. First, there are excellent novels about men living through periods of instability and cultural decline. John Galsworthy\u2019s \u201cForsyte Saga\u201d is a sweeping meditation on marriage, legacy, and the pursuit of property ownership. John Updike\u2019s \u201cRabbit Angstrom\u201d quartet follows one man\u2019s uneasy passage through postwar America with all the lust, failure, and spiritual confusion of fatherhood. John Dos Passos\u2019s \u201cU.S.A.\u201d is a trilogy that paints a fragmented, panoramic portrait of American ambition and disenchantment between the world wars, and Cormac McCarthy\u2019s \u201cThe Border Trilogy\u201d chronicles the loneliness and beauty of two young cowboys moving through an American frontier in decline.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s John Cheever\u2019s \u201cWapshot Chronicles,\u201d which captures the rebellion of two young men from south of Boston who grow up to discover the world has no place for them. And Tom Wolfe\u2019s \u201cA Man in Full\u201d satirizes the sometimes fragile, sometimes triumphant American male ego in its quest for power and respect in an unstable society. <\/p>\n
There are some novels that may not appear on any top-100 list but that have stayed with me: Henry Miller\u2019s \u201cBlack Spring,\u201d an R-rated book that\u2019s really about the ecstasy of being alive; John Crowley\u2019s \u201cLittle, Big,\u201d a luminous novel about family, myth, and time; Edith Wharton\u2019s \u201cThe Age of Innocence\u201d and Iris Murdoch\u2019s \u201cThe Black Prince,\u201d which remind us that the male psyche is often best illuminated by female genius.<\/p>\n
To close out with some humor: Jerome K. Jerome\u2019s \u201cThree Men in a Boat,\u201d Paul Beatty\u2019s \u201cThe Sellout,\u201d and Kingsley Amis\u2019s \u201cLucky Jim\u201d \u2014 three novels that have helped me take life a bit less seriously.<\/p>\n
I view literature not as an escape or eccentricity but as a way of understanding life. And I\u2019ve noticed, more and more, that other men see it as strange, an unusual affectation rather than a central part of adulthood. That strikes me as a loss. Not just for them but for all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. There are, broadly speaking, three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75,33031],"class_list":{"0":"post-49047","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ideas-cover"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}