Why men aren’t reading novels

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Men and boys are reading less fiction than women – works that could help them to empathise more and challenge a toxic psyche. What can be done to encourage them to pick up a book again?

I worked at a bookshop in west London in the 2010s. The shop was split into two halves: turn right through the door and you reached fiction; turn left and you hit non-fiction.

Each day I would watch the customers bifurcate. Parents of young children would be dragged towards the shelves with Harry Potter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Tourists and retirees would enjoy a slow peruse of our classic literature selection, tenderly cradling the spine of a Brontë or Austen. And middle-aged men would stride in after work and lift Peter Frankopan’s historical tome The Silk Roads or Antony Beevor’s doorstopper about the Ardennes offensive, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world.

It is, in a way, part of the discourse about toxic masculinity. To read fiction is to imagine other lives, to empathise with them, to unlock new wells of understanding. It is an antidote to misogyny, to extremism, to fascism. Yet men are, in the eyes of many, recusing themselves from this, moving through society like automata, scrolling, dead-eyed, through social media, and then going home to play Call of Duty and watch porn. But have men actually stopped engaging with fiction?

In a YouGov survey this autumn, 32 per cent of British men said they had read no books in the previous three months, compared with only 20 per cent of women.

In an Arts Council-funded survey of reading habits last year, 15 per cent of male respondents described themselves as “non-readers” (versus 10 per cent of women), while women were 11 per cent more likely to say that they “enjoyed” reading.

It is a discrepancy that starts early. In June, the National Literacy Trust published a report on children’s reading habits. From ages five to eight, 56.3 per cent of boys reported they enjoyed reading, compared with 67.1 per cent of girls; from eight to 18, that percentage fell to 28.8 per cent of boys and 42.3 per cent of girls.

There are roughly four-and-a-half million boys aged between eight and 18 in the UK.

This despite a curriculum…

Every…

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