I am still with Resa Dudovitz  book on women’s fiction and it strikes me that there is truth in the notion that “women read fiction, men read non-fiction”. This is confirmed by Nina Baym’s 1978 Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 and Dudovitz herself. In keeping with Walter Benjamin’s and my credo: “I have nothing to say, only to show,” some quotes from the interweb:

The Google query used is “women read fiction” “men read”

Add to this elitist ideology the marketing mantra, prevalent in Canadian publishing circles, that women read fiction and men read non-fiction (a foolish and sexist notion) and you get an annual flood on the Canadian fiction lists of so-called “women’s books” — interchangeable novels set in the domestic arena that deal with realistically portrayed family crises. –Canadian National Post

According to Camille Paglia, plot, is a Western male, well, plot. “Tragedy is a male paradigm of rise and fall,” she says, “a graph in which dramatic and sexual climax are in shadowy analogy. Climax is another Western invention.” Traditional Eastern stories, she continues, are by contrast “picaresque, horizontal chains of incident. There is little suspense or sense of an ending.”

How does this sit with the fact that for decades the novel’s readership and, increasingly, its writers, publishers and theorists have been predominantly female? Two centuries back, fiction was forbidden, dangerous territory for women; this, some speculate, may be what generated its attraction. Now, it’s more like territory abandoned by men. Women read fiction, men read non-fiction. The novel has become women’s business.

The novelist Ian McEwan recently described his efforts to give away good novels (not exclusively his own) in a park near his London home. Only women were interested. “When women stop reading,” McEwan concluded, “the novel will be dead.” –Written by The Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Elizabeth Farrelly

It has often been suggested that men read less than women (England 1992).

The BML (2000) report “Reading the Situation” found that young women aged 17-34 are “3 times as likely as men in the same age group to borrow from a public library (54% compared to 18%)” (p.14).

The report also found that 77% of women read fiction compared to only 44% of men.

England and Sumsion (1995) also made this discovery, (p.22). This information tells us that women are more likely to read fiction and borrow from libraries than men. But what about men who do read fiction, does this mean they are more likely to buy what they read? It would appear so, England, (1994) found that heavy book buyers were more likely to be men than women a discovery also made by Mann in 1991. Mann stated that “buying (40%) was higher than amongst women (35%)” (p.12 in Kinnell 1991). –Buy, borrow or beg? An investigation into how fiction readers get their books

Using the Iwan McEwan quote in Google I found:

Every young woman we approached – in central London practically everyone seems young – was eager and grateful to take a book. Some riffled through the pile murmuring, “Read that, read that, read that …” before making a choice. Others asked for two, or even three.

The guys were a different proposition. They frowned in suspicion, or distaste. When they were assured they would not have to part with their money, they still could not be persuaded. “Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks mate, but no.” Only one sensitive male soul was tempted. –Hello, would you like a free book?

P. S. Curious, no, how the notion of reading has become synonymous with reading fiction? A person who does not read much is a person who does not read much fiction. Why is it that we reserve such admiration for the reading of fiction, of made-up stories; is it because we have lost the power to dream, fantasize and fabulate?