WHY DON’T MEN READ

This is a question I have, and it has to be unpacked a little bit. For starters, when people say, “Why don’t men read?” they mean primarily, “Why don’t men read fiction?”

I have a good friend who is smart and very successful. He has one child in college, one soon to join, and whenever he can’t get a hold of me, he makes fun of me and says, “Sean’s probably off reading a book,” which is true a lot of the time. The other day, I asked him if he reads. He laughed and, like many men I’ve met, was proud of the fact that he didn’t read books. I then asked, “Do you want your sons to read books?” He said, “Yeah, of course,” and immediately he saw the discrepancy.

“I guess I fucked up that one,” he said.

I don’t blame him or judge him for not reading books. He’s not alone. I know artists who don’t read books. I used to work with an artistic director at a theater who proudly used to tell me all the time that he read a lot, but he didn’t read books, a huge smile on his face— like he was saying “fuck this books.”

I think men adopt this because there’s actually a shame to it. The easiest way to dismiss the shame is to own it, to make it a cool thing that you don’t read books. An active choice. It’s not my failing. It’s the books’.

And they might not be wrong.

You say books are dumb, they’re fake, they’re made up. They don’t hold my attention. The last one is actually a more fair thing to say, and I think a lot of books don’t hold attention. I try to read a lot more books than I actually finish. If something doesn’t hold me, I abandon it, unlike my wife who finishes almost everything.

But when a book grabs me, I tear through it. I read Emma Cline’s The Guest in no time at all. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow—same thing, two or maybe three days. That thing swallowed me. I couldn’t even get work done, and that fucking book made me cry. Sally Rooney’s Normal People is also an excellent book. All of these things really hit me, but I keep noticing things with my own students and with people I work with in comics, film, and theater: most men don’t read books.

So again… It might be the books’ fault.

There’s a moment in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon looks at Robin WIlliams’ bookshelves and says, “you people got all this money and buy the wrong fucking books.”

I think the market is Robin Williams. It has the wrong books despite being able to pick anything they want. Men buy less books. So less books are made for them. Men buy less books and so less get made for them.

But why do they buy less? One because the books they want are not being made. Most men I know want books that have and explore violence, they take on masculinity without immediately framing it as toxic, they want to see how to connect with their sons, and not be their friends, but to raise them as good men.

It seems society would benefit from books like this, too. But, alas.

The second issue is getting men to read books earlier. Start reading at a young age and create the habit. But again you need to make books that boys want to read. Horn books did a study of YA books and found only 22% of YA books had a male protagonist. I know from our own conversations that my son does not see himself in the reading material he gets from school or from me.

But he doesn’t hate books. He reads manga non stop. And he loves stories. He hears me talking to my wife or a friend about something and will jump in- “wait, what happened? Why did they do that? Who are they?”

I’ve been trying to get him to read books without making it a chore that he hates. We have a book club. Just me and him. I pick out books; we try and read them. If we get halfway through and he doesn’t like it, we abandon it and try something else. So, far Holes is surviving- a tale about a group of boys at a detention work camp where the warden makes them dig mysterious holes in the ground. The Outsiders and The Pigman (two favorites of my youth) failed.

This is a step up from books they’ve tried to read in school to which he has said: “These don’t feel like the boys in my class. They don’t feel like me.”As an adult reader, I feel like this often as well. I pick up a book and I go, “I don’t think I’m invited to this party.”

There are men I talk to who used to read. It’s funny, almost all of them reference the same couple of books: “I really loved Fight Club. I really loved American Psycho. I really liked The Corrections.”

Fight Club and American Psycho are interesting because they were huge books that have NO current day stand-in. That is nuts. .Both are satire. In both cases, a lot of people who read them did not get the message of the books, which makes them somewhat dangerous. But I think that’s also what men want from a book: they want it to be a bit dangerous. They want it to be a little less on the nose. Less didactic and neat. They kind of get interested when it says: “Are you fucked up? Have you thought this, too? Are you upset about this thing, too?”

On my text threads I see a lot of men struggling. Struggling with finance, with health, with children, with work, with beliefs, with ideologies, with their own expectations of the man they want to be. The best man they can be.

Those dudes should have books.

But why do I even give a shit?

I care about books. I care about stories. I think books give us empathy. I think for men, they give them a way to explore and express a level of rage that you cannot express in your day-to-day, but is there. I think the more editors and critical thinkers try to dismiss that as just some very bland, base idea of toxic masculinity, the more you’re going to end up with Andrew Tate.

No hyperbole. I think the drop in reading, in literacy and open expressions of rage… lead to a less favorable outlet.

That same friend who doesn’t read, his sons aren’t reading. But they are angry. They are seeking examples outside their dad for manhood. And they are getting attracted to Tate.

They are attracted to podcasts, to men who tell them how to succeed, how to get women, how to get laid, how to be powerful, how to be an alpha, and “don’t be a beta.” Men telling stories. But stories where there is no critical analysis. There’s no internal monologue they can look at. There’s no juxtaposition in the way that a novel would that makes you read about American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, but also judge Patrick Bateman and see how his own brain is in conflict with itself, the same way that all of our brains are in conflict with ourselves.

The fact is that good men are dangerous without being toxic. They’re dangerous because they’re smart, because they’re in touch with their own emotions. They’re dangerous because they’re strong physically and mentally. They’re dangerous because they will fight you for the right thing, but they’re dangerous because they are also smart enough to figure out better ways to succeed. I worry for my own son because I don’t want the only place he can put those questions, those thoughts, those needs and feelings, into a YouTube video from a guy who couldn’t give a shit about anything but monetizing my son. The dopamine hit of primal wants.

We need books and media that explore this.

The opposite will be pretty damning.

Quick Hits

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow—great read. The Guest—fantastic, fantastic read.

Movies this week: I saw Sheep Detectives with my son and Apex by myself. I’ll write about those later in the week.

Thank you for everyone who’s been subscribing and telling other people. Things have been growing faster than I expected. I appreciate it.