Today’s Guardian Book Blog once again takes up the challenge of what to do about male literacy. Apparently research has once again shown that hardly any men read books. (Although, as Farah once had in her email sig, “if men don’t read and women don’t read SF, who on Earth is buying it?”)
Anyway, Jean Hannah Edelstein has some concrete suggestions as to what to do about the problem:
Real change won’t occur until publishers band together and make a concentrated effort to re-masculate reading. One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen’s editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football.
It obviously works too. Ian McDonald put football in his last novel and it got on the Hugo ballot.
What might work, really, is a similar effort to those made for girls in the US elsewhere over the past couple of decades, encouraging them to become young women interested in math and science. Boys had similar lacks where girls were strong, back then, and still do because there has not been a strong “We need to get more boys reading” movement.
The suggestion about more sports in the books, I hear all the time, and more wars and more pirates and whatever, and…it’s hard to get adult readers to *be* readers again when they’ve given up the habit along the way of growing up, like most people do.
“Ian McDonald put football in his last novel and it got on the Hugo ballot.”
Don’t forget Cory Doctorow having his protagonist get to a position of power using gaming consoles, and also getting on the ballot!
Although with this line of reasoning, Charles Stross must surely win the Hugo for having a sexbot main character… 🙂
If men don’t read and women don’t read SF, who on Earth is buying it?
Now there’s an obnoxiously mediocre story just waiting to be written. Probably a Hugo contender, too, if it’s nostalgic enough.