Even John Green did not get *huge* until he wrote a girl protagonist

[owlectomy]

A lot of people who criticize women for reading Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight or whatever don't even realize that men would be responsible for just as many silly or mockable bestsellers if men were reading as much fiction as women are.

If you look at what was being published decades ago, pulp fiction was very gender-coded. There were, and are, romances for women; for men, there were a ton of western novels and adventure novels and Mack Bolan and whatnot. That genre is much smaller than it used to be because guys stopped reading them. The audience got older and the new generation that would've replaced them just started playing video games and reading blogs and articles on the internet.

A NY Times article from way back in 1997 says,

''The techno-thriller has become a kind of emoto-thriller, if you will,'' Mr. Kirshbaum said. ''What we used to call the boy books don't work nearly as well as they once did, except for a brief spurt at Father's Day.''

And I think that's not outdated -- I think it's the beginning of a change that has continued up until the present.

This is just meant as observation, not as criticism. People should do whatever makes them happy with their leisure time. If a person is kind of marginal in terms of how strong they are as a reader, then pleasure reading -- no matter how "unsophisticated"! -- is certainly a useful thing. I like reading fiction and I do have a financial interest in other people liking it too but I'm not one of those people who'll yell about The Decline Of Civilization, especially when I know lots of people who don't read much fiction because of time and attention issues.

But I do think it's odd when people talk about these books driven by women readers as a huge problem with literary culture, while not talking about the men who aren't reading fiction at all.

Comments

[writerjenn.livejournal.com]

Do you think nonfiction has become bigger in leisure reading? Or was it always big? It seems to me that a lot of adults read nonfiction (I read a fair amount myself), but I'm not sure if nonfiction gained former fiction readers.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

That's a good question! I think it was always big. (And it's kind of a truism among librarians that even for children, it's easier to get boys to read nonfiction than fiction.)

My impression is that nonfiction books are holding steady in terms of what I see getting checked out at the library, but if you look at nonfiction in broader terms -- to include Buzzfeed and Huffington Post and Lifehacker and all the blogs and internet magazines - then nonfiction has really exploded. It's like you don't even have to consider that "leisure reading," it's just part of the daily routine. And I think it's very easy to promote nonfiction books that way -- you publish one chapter in Buzzfeed or wherever, and a certain percentage of the people who make it to the end of that chapter are going to say "Oh, I want to read more about this subject; I will read the rest of the book." Whereas I feel like that doesn't really work for fiction because I have to switch gears in my mind; I don't mind reading fiction on the web but it takes enough attention and concentration that I can't do it as part of my regular web browsing.

[writerjenn.livejournal.com]

Yes; fiction often takes more mental world-building.