10 Reasons Why Men Must Start Reading Fiction Again
According to recent statistics, men have all but stopped reading fiction. Do they watch great television? Yes. Do they read non-fiction? Some. But the novel – that great interior journey – seems to have been lost to them.
It wasn’t always this way.
The path from boyhood to manhood used to go something like this: Boys got dirty, played with plastic guns, disturbed bee hives, and wandered the streets of their neighborhoods with their buddies un-chaperoned. By adolescence, they were expected to be rowdy and wild – maybe dabbling in the rebel art of cigarette smoking, drawing a sharpie tattoo, and practicing the skill of talking girls into peeling off their panties (beginning with the whole “I’ll give you a cookie” approach and graduating to “Come on, baby, you’re just so beautiful –I need you!”).
Next, somewhere in their twenties, boys began dressing like men – assertively and with a sense of style that wasn’t strictly reserved for gay men and the odd metrosexual. A man learned how to play poker, how to dance, and how to unzip a dress.
Oh, and one more thing…a man read fiction.
In short, until fairly recently -sometime in the mid to late 1980s, I estimate – the kind of man boys aspired to be was culturally literate.
Playboy and Esquire used to feature fiction every month and a large cross-section of men felt compelled to read the latest by William Styron or Raymond Carver. Your average college-educated male knew damned well who won the Pulitzer and had an opinion as to who really should have gone home with the prize (even if he got that opinion from some other guy in a locker room).
But nowadays it’s the women’s publications like Elle and Oprah that feature Joan Didion, Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen. Men’s magazines have gone all Cosmo on us – Get Great Abs! Make Her Scream In Bed – For Real!
It is estimated some 80% of fiction readers today are women. The men who still read novels are to a large extent either thriller readers (i.e. troglodytes according to the cultured class) or soft, overly-sensitive men who read Margaret Atwood novels and feel a woman’s pain so acutely they need to go lie down.
A close male friend of mine – an extremely intelligent and otherwise cultured man – actually said he doesn’t read fiction because it’s “unserious.”
So, without further ado, here are my ten most persuasive arguments for why men need to start reading fiction again – STAT!
10. Fiction teaches you how to think rather than merely what to think, and this is one of the crucial differences between a leader and a follower. No matter how well done, TV and film do too much of the work for you. The curve of a woman’s face isn’t merely alluded to or described, but shown up close and often on an actress you’ve seen a dozen times in a similar role. A line is delivered the way the actor interprets the dialogue. But when we read, we are the interpreters, the masters of the experience.
9. It will make you better at your job.Why? Because good fiction, unlike the platitude-ridden business self-help genre, examines the way real human beings behave and react in a variety of situations. Want to understand the mind of a change-averse bureaucrat? Read James Thurber’s The Catbird Seat. Or how about the maneuverings of a power-hungry subordinate? Iago from Othello will give you something to chew on. And if you want to read about a boss who feels threatened by a talented subordinate, pick up my husband’s novel, Corporate America (#2 thriller on Amazon – what a man!). If you’re still shaking your head and don’t quite believe that fiction can help you succeed in your career, just take a look at Silicon Valley, where the most popular business book is The Fountainhead. Novel-reading seems to be working pretty well for all those billionaires over there.
8. Since so few men are reading fiction right now, you can claim some of the best literary quotes as your own and your (male) friends and colleagues will think you’re a genius!
7. Literature adds to reality. It does not simply describe it. (See? #8 works! And you thought I made that up, didn’t you? It was actually CS Lewis.) Nonfiction, the average male reader’s favorite “literature”, can teach you a great many things – like a cadaver can illuminate you about your body. But it cannot caress you with a turn of phrase, start a fire of heroic ideals, make you fall in love with the mortifying, saccharine emotion of a Harlequin Romance. Only fiction can do that.
6. Fiction can raise your testosterone levels. There is plenty of “men’s” literature that has an erotic element but doesn’t get all Fifty Shades on you. Anything by Milan Kundera can teach you about the art of seduction. What guy wouldn’t want to command a hot nurse to take off her clothes the way Tomas did in The Unbearable Lightness of Being? The Uncle Oswald books by Roald Dahl are also great literary rolls in the hay. If you want something stronger and are actually looking for erotica, read some of my friend TW Luedke’s books. They are every bit as dangerous as popping wheelies on a motorcycle.
5. Reading will make you a better citizen. Stories – not sound bytes – help you absorb politics in a way the punditocracy can’t. If you’re right leaning, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand will far better help you elucidate and express your heartfelt opinions than the pseudo-populists at Fox. If you’re left leaning? Try Upton Sinclair in place of the smarty-pants faux intellectuals at MSNBC.
4. To surrender your influence on the cultural landscape and on education – both of which are shaped in large part by fiction and fiction readers (i.e. women)- is simply wimpy.
3. Because in reading fiction, we are able to absorb a greater truth instead of an assemblage of facts. This is true when comparing the novel to the non-fiction book or to the film or television show. The difference between fiction and non-fiction is the difference between learning morals and learning manners. One will get you through a dinner party and the other will get you through life (and perhaps even the afterlife). The difference between reading a story and watching one on TV is the difference between making love to the love of your life and having a friend with benefits. Not knocking the latter, but…
2. The spoken and written word in the form of a fictional story has been as important, historically, in a man’s life journey as sports, trolling with friends, and becoming the master of his destiny. The novel has been an unfailing aid in his evolution – in learning to love, becoming a husband and a father, being a friend. Doing what is right and understanding the consequences of shirking his morals and ethics.
1. It’ll get you the women you want. And not just the ones who’ll have you.
If you don’t know where to even start – let me help you:
A Fable by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Macbeth, Henry V by William Shakespeare (yes, Shakespeare – don’t be a wuss)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Corporate America by Jack Dougherty (trust me, this is not just love talkin’ here)
The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
Come on! Snoop Dogg does it. Now it’s your turn. What is the novel you think every man should read? 
Cold 
Many have tried to explain why it is that fewer men read fiction these days. Nobody has truly succeeded. Without a clear understanding of that phenomenon, it is hard to say what reasons would incline them more or less to change their habits. Needless to say, reading in general has declined over time as TV and online viewing have increased. Most reading today is done online, of things that don’t really matter much. Less to really think about, in a world that bombards us daily with information overload. Perhaps one reason that needs more thought and rumination is that reading fiction, for better or worse, has been feminized to the point that men find it less satisfying than they used to. If that is true, then perhaps it helps very little to have a woman offer reasons why men should do something to improve themselves. What they really need, I suppose, is other men of distinction setting the example. But, therein lies the rub, eh? Even so, I enjoyed this piece, and it made me stop and think, even distracting me from the work of writing a book that I think men would really enjoy, if they read more.
Your list, Victoria, is spot on–a manly list. Thanks for that. Also the many lists contained in the comments section, all of which are excellent. I would simply add one: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, reading from which all men might benefit who aspire to manly integrity in the midst of a society that just doesn’t seem to care anymore.
Yes! McCarthy belongs on that list! Thank you.
Just men have declined reading novels? I suspect it’s all genders.
I work with a number of Millennials, men and women, and none of them read novels.
It’s multi-faceted: Text messaging and internet shorthand have conspired to destroy language and shorten attention spans. Few have the patience to spend several hours reading.
Toss into the mix that nearly a half-million new novels are published annually—most poorly written, poorly edited, if at all, poorly packaged drivel—and you have this result: the novel is dying.
It may be down across the board, but the novel is basically extinct for men. Women – at least women my age – tend to be avid fiction readers. I have hope because there is an appetite for epic storytelling. For years, we were told – mostly by the media – that viewers have no attention span and won’t watch quality tv, etc., yet now we’re living through another golden age of television, which is offering us high-quality and complex storytelling. Reading is an intimate, gloriously creative experience. I think absorbing a story through the written word will always have a place, as long as writers and publishers are able to adapt and reinvent. While I agree that there’s a glut of fiction out there right now – mostly due to Indie publishing – there’s also a great deal of energy and dynamism. I suppose time will tell. Thanks for the comment – and the chance for a conversation about this 🙂
I’ve heard it said, and I’ve repeated it many times in many places: a novel is only as good as what it’s words make happen inside the reader’s head, and no two readers are alike.
Amen.
This post was truly worthwhile to read.
Thank you! So glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks!