Once men used to get together to watch sport and drink beer. Now they have muscled in on a female craze. Viv Groskop asks whether there is such a thing as a man’s read.
by: Viv Groskop
‘Men debate things in a different way,” says a friend of mine who has been in an all-male book group for several years. “From what I’ve heard of women’s book groups, they tend to get together, talk about the book and then go off into different topics. Whereas in a men’s book group, if the book is good we will argue about it vociferously until midnight. It can get quite aggressive and passionate.”
Another man I know was thrown out of his (mixed) book group for suggesting the wrong kind of literature. “I really wanted to do Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. Things got out of control. One of the other members sent an email saying: ‘You don’t even like Orhan Pamuk so what do you know about anything?’ Everyone else thought Orhan Pamuk was amazing and I thought he was pretentious. So that was it. I was dumped. They just carried on without me.”
Fifteen years after Oprah Winfrey first launched her book club, spawning a predominantly female craze, men’s reading groups appear to be on the rise. The Boston Globe asked recently: “Where are the guys? They’re at their book group. Discussing books.” Or are they? Rick Marin replied on Salon.com: “We’re middle-aged guys who needed an excuse to hang out, read and sometimes look at porn. Got a problem with that?”
Last month the Canadian writer Malcolm Johnston performed an experiment in his five-strong all-male book club: they decided to read a novel by the romance writer Nora Roberts, one of the first authors to sell more than one million copies on Kindle alongside James Patterson and Stieg Larsson. Conclusion? “I can get why girls read this. It’s easy to slip into the fantasy and the ridiculous sex scenes and the girls being girls. You can see why it sells like hot cakes.”
So is the traditionally feminine face of the book group changing? And are men’s groups more likely to discuss the book to the exclusion of anything else?
Ten years ago Jenny Hartley’s survey Reading Groups concluded that there were around 50,000 groups in Britain. Sixty-nine per cent were women only. Only four per cent were men only. Although there is no new data on book groups, an American survey published last month suggests that the business of reading is more male-dominated than we imagine. And anecdotally male books groups are definitely on the rise.
Men’s groups appear to be more likely to have blogs, online reading lists or organise themselves via Facebook groups. It seems common for them to have actual written rules and even more common – hilariously, surely? – for them to have a chairman.
The author Guy Walters has confessed that his all-male book club, The Dissectors, has a monogrammed tie (a quill pen with a blade on the end), a charter and a chairman. This is serious stuff compared with most women’s groups. (In my own book group – of women – we struggle to decide on a monthly date to meet and we’ve been going for over five years.)
There is still, though, a certain snobbery about book groups that may put some men off. Sebastian Faulks writes in his new book Faulks on Fiction: “There are monthly book groups that meet to discuss a novel but end up talking only about two things: the extent to which the contents are drawn from the author’s life and the extent to which these in turn tally with the readers’ own experience of such matters.” Not exactly a resounding endorsement of book group culture.
As well as usually wanting to discuss the writer’s life and their own lives, all book groups tend to have one other thing in common: members rarely want to betray their group. So my attempts to observe two men-only groups were politely but firmly rebuffed.
Several men in mixed book groups expressed disbelief that men-only groups existed at all. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an all-male book group,” said one enthusiastic member of a mixed-gender neighbours’ book group. Another told me he knew one men’s group very well: “They’ve only ever had one book. They never read it. And they meet in the pub.”
Others are more committed. Simon Chambers, a mathematician from Ipswich, maintains an online reading list for his club, The Men Only Book Group, who have tackled everything from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. They’re currently reading Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. A group of six, they meet at the pub at 7.30pm strictly and later adjourn for curry. They read 11 books a year, with a break over Christmas: “Every November we have the chance to choose a long book,” Chambers explains. “Recently someone chose War and Peace. Everyone sighed and groaned. But it was absolutely wonderful. After I finished it, I regretted coming to the end.”
There is no rule in his group that you have to finish the book, but usually everyone does. (Only one person didn’t finish War and Peace. And who can blame him?) But do they actually talk about the books and only the books? “Sometimes, if it’s a very light book, the conversation will move on to sport and beer. But usually we do two hours solid on the book or things that come out of the book,” he says.
Since 2004, Chambers’s Men Only Book Group has read only a handful of titles by women – although Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was one of their most popular choices.
Other groups are even more draconian. One American book group member writes: “My friends requested a book club for men, reading books by men, written for men. I know it sounds a little macho but this was what they wanted. And it has worked well for us.”
On Amazon there is even a recommended reading list entitled “Books for Men: the Anti-Oprah Book Club” that features American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. But it also lists John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which resulted in one of my (all-women) book club’s best-ever discussions.
Surely there is no such thing, then, as a man’s read? Gender and reading is still a fraught subject.
Last month a study by Vida, an organisation in the United States for women in the arts, uncovered a huge gender imbalance in which authors are reviewed and by whom. It found that in the London Review of Books, books by men took up 74 per cent of space and 78 per cent of the reviews were written by men. The New York Review of Books was worse, with more than 80 per cent male authors and reviewers.
It is a widely acknowledged truism that women still drive book sales – some estimate as much as 80 per cent of the fiction-buying market. As Ian McEwan once put it: “Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
In 2009 a survey of 2,000 British readers concluded that “men are just not that into reading”. It found 48 per cent of women qualified as Page Turners (“avid readers”) compared with only 26 per cent of men. In the Slow Worms category (“they read one or two books a year”) there were 32 per cent men, 18 per cent women.
The novelist Lionel Shriver (a woman who changed her name from Margaret Ann at the age of 15 and whose work appeals to anyone who wants an intelligent read, regardless of gender) has complained “that publishing’s notion of ‘what women want’ is dated and condescending”.
This gender debate is now being taken increasingly seriously in the US (where one study shows – gulp – that one in four people have never read a book). The editor turned bestselling thriller writer Jason Pinter recently wrote in the Huffington Post that “this empty excuse of ‘Men Don’t Read’ has begotten a vicious cycle”. Publishers rarely publish books directly aimed at men, he added: “Somehow that equates to our entire gender having given up on the reading of books.” He dismantled research claiming that women read more fiction than men by a 4-1 margin. Men love books, he concluded, but editorial meetings in publishing houses are overpopulated by women and no one is marketing at male readers.
Perhaps the rise of men’s book groups can finally turn this around. Chambers says: “We get a lot of enjoyment out of reading novels and without the discipline of the group we wouldn’t otherwise read them. It’s because we’re not obvious readers that it works so well.”
Still doesn’t appeal? Maybe start with Mötley Crüe instead.
from: Telegraph
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