Men and Reading

Caroline Carpenter reports in  the Bookseller that 63% of men rarely read. I wanted to cheer when I saw the headline, because the man I live with finds reading a chore. He'll be delighted to hear he is not alone!

 The Reading Agency commissioned the survey of 2,000 UK men and women which discovered - if surveys can be believed, of course - that men prefer to watch film instead. The reasons (excuses!) given were - too busy, did not enjoy reading, preferred doing the internet. One in five men admitted to pretending to have read a specific title in order to appear more intelligent. It also emerged that 30%  have not picked up a book since their school days. Men read more slowly, read fewer books and  are less likely to finish them than women. If all this is true, I am left wondering why so many literary critics are male. Why not more females writing up the reviews in the press since we do more reading?

World Book Night, where volunteers hand out thousands of free books to reluctant readers in their communities, is coming up on April 23rd. The focus this year is on men who aren’t reading enough.
The list of books was selected with young men in mind:-

Hello Mum by Bernardine Evaristo (Quick Read) (Penguin General)
Four Warned by Jeffrey Archer (Quick Read) (Macmillan)
A Perfect Murder by Peter James (Quick Read) (Macmillan)
Today Everything Changes by Andy McNab (Quick Read)(Transworld)
Short Stories by Roald Dahl (Michael Joseph)
CHERUB: The Recruit by Robert Muchamore (Hachette Children’s)
Theodore Boone by John Grisham (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Humans by Matt Haig (Canongate)
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (Vintage)
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (Transworld)
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (Orion)
After the Funeral by Agatha Christie (HarperCollins)
Whatever it Takes by Adele Parks (Headline)
Geezer Girls by Dreda Say Mitchell (Hodder & Stoughton)
Black Hills by Nora Roberts (Little, Brown)
Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon (Michael Joseph)
The Boy With the Topknot by Sathnam Sanghera (Penguin General)
59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman (Macmillan)
Confessions of a GP by Dr Benjamin Daniels (The Friday Project).

Once again, women lose out. Next year, why not celebrate women who read?

World Book Night 2

Follow the link and you'll discover the list of titles involved in April's World Book Night Giveaway. The list contains some books I've read and some I haven't, but I think it is interesting, with something for everyone. I was intrigued to see that they'd included Touching the Void - the book about climbing that still gives me nightmares.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/24/world-book-night-giveaway

The event isn't about authors, it's about readers, and encouraging more readers into reading. Sometimes it seems that reading is a dying art. It also seems to have caught on to something long accepted in the e-book world, namely that a book given away repays and keeps on paying by bringing the reader back to that author's backlist and any titles published in years to come.

If people are not encouraged to read, then in a few years time authors will not have an audience, and that's a sobering thought. So let's get behind the event now, and promote it.

World Book Night - how was it?

World Book Night. I watched on tv, and the only part I enjoyed was the hour with Sue Perkins. The rest was the usual stodgy stuff about literary novels that often, as so many people agreed, may be full of beautifully crafted sentences but don’t have a plot.
Sue admitted to spending her life reading literary novels, and claimed her favourite was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Bombarded by the BBC with a selection of bestsellers from the last fifty years, she began to feel that she wasn’t at all well read and pursued interesting interviews with several best selling authors including Ian Rankin, Felix Francis, Joanne Harris, Lee Child, and others.

I have to admit that as an English Lit graduate, I haven’t read all the classics. I did read Crime and Punishment, but beyond the general premise of committing murder and feeling guilty, I don’t recall much of it. The same with Oblomov, who stayed in bed all day. War and Peace is still waiting, and may go on waiting. Anna Karenina I enjoyed.

All it really means is that I am still discovering novelists like Wilkie Collins and Stevenson's peculiar episodic adventures like The Black Arrow. My Sony reader gives me access to the classics for free (or a very small fee) and it is illuminating to read the old classics now, when I’m attempting my own (coughs delicately) epic.
The last segment of WBN on tv was a group of five people who got together to decide which twelve novels by newly published authors would make the grade. (Since none of them were known to me, I wasn't overly moved by their reasoning.) The novels were all literary (as opposed to potential bestsellers), and when the fifty were whittled down to 12, the panel agreed that many of them showed distinct signs of Creative Writing School rules. (Evidently there are now some 200 courses available around the country.) Flashbacks and other stylistic features abounded and one judge declared regretfully that out of the 50, he couldn't recall a single novel whose storyline travelled in a straight line from A to B to the end.
One has to wonder if creative writing schools are going to kill the creative instinct rather than nurture it.