Stealing from Conversational Reading
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Where they did produce titles, men’s reading did not show the same range as the women’s had done. For the women’s project we interviewed 400 women and ended up with some 200 titles. We found we had to approach a significantly larger sample of men to get a similar number of responses. From an early stage, the choices clustered around a set of out-and-out favourites: Camus’s The Outsider, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. These titles remained consistently popular, which was something that failed to happen with the women’s titles, which changed daily, throwing up little-known books alongside familiar classics. . . .
Part of the reason for this, we decided, was that, to a far larger degree than women, men’s formative reading was done between the ages of 12 and 20 – indeed, specifically around the ages of 15 and 16. For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence. Many men admitted that they had read little fiction since, though mature men returned to fiction reading in later life, and expressed increasing enjoyment in reading for "self-reflection".
Each gender’s fave is also quite telling. Let’s compare the "memorable lines."
Women: "Reader, I married him."
Men: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know."
Also interestingly, the man-book ranks significantly higher on Amazon than the woman-book. This in spite of the fact that the study (and other studies) indicates that women read more than men.
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I wouldn’t necessarily take your cues from Prof. Jardine when interpreting the list. She seems curiously bent on spinning the choices in a particularly reductive and stereotypical way “the men’s list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading” or this bizarre statement “they read novels a bit like they read photography manuals”. C’mon for flips sake.
When I look at the list of the top twenty books I see a lot of variety and also a lot of depth. A lot of familiar names for sure but then anything too obscure is going to come out in the wash when a top 20 is collated from a fairly large base like this. The major weakness of the list of course, and It is a real weakness, is the scarcity of women on it. The women’s top 20 contained 6 male authors which shows more openness to a different gender take but not vastly more.
I cant help but wonder if the negative framing Jardine places on her research stems from a territorial impulse. That the novel is somehow implicitly female, a medium that reflects and suits the psychological make up of women more than it does men’s, and so ownership of the medium by some kind of law of nature should always be primarily in female hands. Maybe I’m projecting on to Prof. Jardine the same way she projects onto the men’s choice but then she does say this “on the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers – many of whom are women – to go through the same kind of recognition”. The conclusion being that publishers should take the gender of the author into consideration when deciding to publish?
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1747821,00.html
Frankly, I think Jardine’s claim that the woman’s list is more diverse is hogwash.
The men’s has a dissapointing lack of women authors perhaps, but it streatches the globe from Russia to South America and haas a VERY diverse set of styles represented. From philosophical novels (Camus) to straight fantasy (Tolkein) to Magical Realism (Marquez) to humor and satire (Catch 22) to pure aestheticism (Nabokov).
What is the women’s list, on the other hand?
A bunch of dead british females (okay a few current canadian and american females thrown in for good measure). The books women picked are very similar in tone/style and subject matter.
Boring.