Men vs. women reading novels

But did they have clearly labelled 'Boys' and 'Girls' sections, or were all children allowed to read whatever books they fancied?

Have been a great reader of fiction since childhood. My first adult stories were the Saint by Leslie Charteris, they are set in the 1930. Then Ian Fleming. Since then all the Spy and espionage ones as well as crime.
Hardly ever finished a novel or a classic. Dickens - Too many bloody words. Mainly in modern novels nothing much happens, the characters waste so much time analysing how they feel or what if it doesn't work. (Stop dithering just get on with it).
Mostly my favourite authors have been men, some like Le Carre and Ted Allburery worked in Intelligence and write from strength of knowledge. One female writer I like is PF Gregory.

Was in my son’s school the other night and was gutted at their library- horror books and then Lee child, John Grisham etc etc, that or football autobiographies. horrendously bad choice in there. I think there’s more of a gradient of choice for girls, although maybe not!

It would be very interesting to do an experiment to release books credited to authors called Sam, Alex or Pat etc. (or Enid, as per PP's DH!!!) and see whether both male and female readers assumed the sex of the author one way or the other, or whether they just didn't ascribe any relevance to it and simply enjoyed the books purely based on the skill of the writer.

There have obviously been female authors in history who have assumed male-sounding pen names, in order to avoid being dismissed by misogynists as 'silly women' and to reach a wider audience - and it's still common to this day for female authors to just use their initials. I guess it occasionally works (partially) the other way, such as with Nicci French - whereby they chose to write under the female co-author's first name and the male co-author's surname, knowing that people would initially just assume a lone female author.

My father doesn’t fit any of the examples you give but was closer to the second. He was very sporty as a young man. When he was older but still working his solitary pursuits were more practical (eg DIY a d gardening) or a combination of physical and mental such as playing various musical instruments.

It was only when he retired, and had more time on his hands, that I really remember him reading much.

My husband is clearly atypical because he has an English degree and has always read a lot of fiction. Now he is retired he reads even more. He has also written a novel (though no luck in having it published yet)!

No, I appreciate your point, @Jane3212, but I recognise that poster’s name now that @FruAashild drew it to my attention, and she does take her opinions and ideas about the canon and who is worth reading directly from Harold Bloom. That’s my issue, not that she prefers to read mid-19th to mid-20thc British authors, or doesn’t read work in translation, or contemporary fiction. It seems to me strange to allow your reading to be limited by one person’s ideas.

(I sat in on a couple of Bloom’s lectures when a friend of mine was taking them during his NYU years and I was living in Boston but used to visit NYC a lot. What I remember most sharply is that he delivered the last few lines of the lecture from the door, which was being held open by a graduate teaching assistant, while another was holding the lift for him.😃)

Wouldn't Harry Potter have still been a little on the young side to have his own DD at that point?!"

There's nothing at all wrong with it as a genre; but it's generally accepted to mean light, 'easy-reading' that is almost exclusively written by female authors and tends to be much more popular with female readers.

The problem comes when it's assumed that women can't write or won't be interested in reading anything more challenging than that; and thus that ALL fiction (and by extension, all books of all kinds) written by and read by men is automatically loftier, mor intellectual and more important.

It's not the best analogy, but in decades gone by when many women didn't work outside the home and relied on their husbands as the breadwinner, some of those women would look for relatively simple informal jobs for maybe a few hours a week to earn a bit of extra 'pin money' for themselves (and, for some, an excuse to get out of the house and meet people)... however, this then led for a long time to ALL jobs that were done by women (including those that were also done by men) being regarded as little trivial 'women's jobs', with the result that they were paid a fraction of what the men would earn.

Naturally, if a woman was a qualified professional working alongside male colleagues in the same job, she was every bit their equal and deserving of exactly the same amount of recompense and respect... but because she happened to be a woman, she was dismissed as much less than. Whether you liked or hated her politics, Margaret Thatcher also had to fight repeatedly to be taken seriously as a woman doing a proper important job - even when she was running the country!

Essentially, I think genre descriptions should largely be related to the type, style, level and subject of the writing itself and not pigeonholed based on the sex of the person who happened to write them, nor to the sex of the people who happen to read them - UNLESS that is the deliberate aim of the genre/book and a large part of its raison d'etre.

I think that's unfair. I like reading pp's reviews, she clearly loves literature and she's very appreciative of women like Austen, Brontes, Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch, Mantel and I think Octavia Butler. Liking mainly 19th-mid 20th British novels is going to shut out a lot of great female authors, that doesn't mean someone's sexist, it can be a personal taste for a period which unfortunately fewer women were able to take full part in.

Re modern fiction, I have seen her write negatively about it though I haven't seen anything criticising black female authors. Personally I think there is a case that a lot of writers promoted (and that includes men as well as women) are somewhat drab and dull. But that's my opinion- and I still have come across many good new books, translated but also English language ones. Part of the issue is that so many books are written today, or course there's more slop : but also good stuff.

This is a great list.

To be fair to pp, she noted immediately that Iris Murdoch was an exception to her rule. I may be thinking of another pp, in which case I apologise, but I think I read a post by her on another thread where she said she mainly reads British fiction from the 19th-mid 20th centuries, which wouldn't include many of the writers on your list. English language fiction mainly doesn't have philosophical novels like, say, 19th century Russian novels, anyway, or not in the same way.

Interesting!

My DH reads fiction, mainly on holiday and on the train to work. The work train commute is a great thing for continuing to read. Since I stopped commuting, I am reading less, I find it hard to read on the sofa at home, too many potential distractions.

DH does only read 'male style' novels, action and crime mainly, Scandi in particular. We do have some overlap, Slow Horses series being the main one that we both loved. He is fairly low on emotional intelligence and has little to no interest in relationships or any general chick lit style content.

It is actually called "Dick lit","lad lit" or "manfiction".

I always feel Plath had more excellent novels in her. The cutting off of her career tends to be mourned in terms of her poetry, but I think she’d have written more novels too, and they might have been very unexpected.

Ah, I should have recognised the name! Thank you!

And fifty more blindingly obvious women novelists of ideas have come to mind since, obviously… Rebecca West! Jenny Offill, Delphine de Vigan, Lucy Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Rachel Cusk, Isabella Hamnad, Sigrid Nunez, Sheila Heti, Anne Michaels etc etc.

If anyone hasn’t read Sigrid Nunez, I totally recommend her. She’s brilliant on friendship, strong autobiographical elements, very meditative.

I’m also absolutely adoring Deborah Levy’s non-fiction at the moment. She has a trilogy of short memoirs about being divorced, single and middle-aged (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate) which are brilliant and insightful and which I prefer to any of her fiction that I’ve read.

Men do read novels sometimes, eg my DB and stepdad read widely fiction.

My boyfriend reads fiction too but likes non fiction too. I’m getting him The Catcher in the Rye as he hasn’t read it yet.

My DH barely reads. The only book he has read since we got together almost twenty years ago, aside from reading to our children, is The Hunger Games, because he fancied J-Law. He loved Enid Blyton and Harry Potter, so when I told him he’s quite the feminist only reading female authors he looked blank. He genuinely thought ‘Enid’ was a MAN! 😂

My dad was one of those ignorant ‘only ever read male authors’ types, that is until I got him The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah a few years back. He bawled his eyes out over it and he has now read everything she’s written and regularly reads female authors. That dismissive ‘women can’t write in a way I understand’ attitude drives me nuts but me getting angry about it wouldn’t have worked with him.

@TrilbyFoot that poster is a fangirl of Harold Bloom and appears to have read predominantly Dead White Males. She is very dismissive of what she considers a modern fashion for black female writers and she doesn't read a lot of translated fiction. So, no, she won't have read many on your excellent list.

As a HP obsessed child I wrote a side series called ‘Harri Potter,’ the daughter of Harry…guess what my name is 😂

Yes agree with the poster above. Also surprised that Woolf is the only aesthete that came to mind. What about Sylvia Plath?

Respectfully, how widely do you read in terms of female novelists? Because if I thought about women novelists who were interested in ideas, at a glance I’d be thinking writers like Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Simone de Beauvoir, Woolf, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Marguerite Duras, Mary McCarthy, AS Byatt, Pearl S Buck, Ali Smith, Virginia Despentes, Hilary Mantel, Olga Tocarczuk, Ursula LeGuin, Siri Hustvedt, Angela Carter, Herta Muller, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Annie Ernaux, Elfriede Jelinek and I’m not even getting started with more contemporary writing!

Apparently, my husband was a big reader of fiction when he was younger. He travelled a lot by train and plane so that may have had something to do with it. He really only reads fiction now when on holiday, and then not always. However, I have noticed that doesn’t seem to any prejudice against female authors.

He does have a huge collection of books but they are virtually all non-fiction. Most fiction books he has kept are from his childhood. There are a few Enid Blytons in there. Does that count?

Yes, I think it's tricky to judge the 'intellectual' but as a lot of the great female novelists (certainly Austen and the Brontes, to name 4) lived in times where women were excluded from degrees etc, which affects things. In Russia, which produced some of the most searching 19th century philosophical novels, the situation was more restrictive, I think (though I'm no expert).

Re intellectual female writers, Flannery O'Connor is a recent one I've got into. She wrote short stories though, not novels.

Didn't Terry Pratchett say something like he wrote his books for boys but it was their mothers who ended up reading them often? He certainly had cross gender appeal.

Yes, I mean it's complex. I like stuff like Cormac Mccarthy, so I feel wary of saying that kind of work is necessarily 'male orientated' because if it's good enough, it should have something for people generally.

But otoh it is frustrating when schools focus on stuff like Of Mice and Men as it's one of the few they feel sure can engage boys. It's also why, before Gove's changes, sometimes schoolchildren were studying more US than British literature, as US has a stronger trend of terse, more 'macho' books. I don't like Gove usually but I agreed with him on that issue.

There is still at least somewhat of an attitude that books or films starring girls won't appeal to boys, but vice versa will appeal to girls. Otoh how accurate is this? A lot of boys like His Dark Materials, for one, which has Lyra as the MC. I'm sure plenty of boys like Roald Dahl stuff like Matilda (or the BFG). It may depend on genre maybe?