Get The Gavel
A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.
There are, broadly speaking, three prevailing theories about this phenomenon. None of them is entirely wrong, but none, I think, is wholly sufficient.
The first is the digital explanation: Men no longer read because they’re glued to screens. The internet, video games, podcasts, TikTok — all of it constitutes a parallel media universe more alluring, and less demanding, than the quiet work of reading. But this account falls short, if only because the male retreat from literature began long before smartphones took over our lives. As some observers have recently pointed out, the decline in male literary reading dates back to the 1980s and ’90s — well before YouTube and Reddit became the twin pillars of male leisure. And women, who spend at least as much time on their screens as men, have not abandoned reading at nearly the same rate: a 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that women remain significantly more likely than men to read for pleasure across all age groups.
The second theory places the blame on the publishing industry. Women dominate publishing, the argument goes — both as workers and as readers — and they’ve steered the culture of books toward priorities many men don’t connect with: identity, representation, trauma, social justice. Scan the tables of new releases in any independent bookstore and you’ll see what critics mean: a glut of titles pitched toward female audiences and political narratives, with fewer and fewer books that men feel are speaking directly to them. This would also explain why women continue to read books even as their screen time has increased: online communities and appealing new titles have kept them turning pages. There’s something to this critique, especially when you consider how poorly men are represented in the contemporary literary landscape, not in terms of raw numbers but in sensibility. And yet this explanation too feels incomplete.
After all, books that men could be reading, the novels of the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, most of them written by men, are still in print. No one is keeping Hemingway or Updike or Bellow a secret. And yet the appetite seems to have vanished. The problem isn’t that men can’t find books that speak to them — it’s that they’re no longer interested in looking.
This brings us to the third theory: that something in male culture has shifted. That inner life — the emotional, reflective, and interpretive habits that literature nourishes — has come to be seen as antithetical to masculinity. That boys are raised to think of novels as feminine, soft, somehow suspect. There’s truth here, too, and it’s probably the most troubling of the explanations. But even this feels like only part of the picture.
I think something far simpler is going on: I don’t believe men have been shown what literature is for, and the blame for that is widely shared. High school syllabi too often chop novels into excerpts, avoid assigning whole books, and fail to give students the time to read independently and for pleasure. Books are not being presented to boys as sources of escape or adventure — on par with the coolest video game or most entertaining movie. The expanding field of online male influencers is not exactly portraying literature as something that might deepen, rather than diminish, one’s masculinity.
Yet literature offers something men desperately need: a way to process the complexities of their own experience. To understand what it means to be a son, a brother, a father, a lover, a friend. To hold in mind contradictory impulses and shifting roles. To be tender without being weak, open without being unmoored, confident without being cruel. These are not “female” qualities. They are human ones. But it’s through literature that many of us learn how to inhabit them.
This isn’t about becoming a literary dandy who can summarize Proust at parties. Reading novels isn’t for show. It makes you more empathetic, more emotionally agile, more capable of navigating the world’s demands with subtlety and grace.
But where to start? I’ve got some recommendations. First, there are excellent novels about men living through periods of instability and cultural decline. John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga” is a sweeping meditation on marriage, legacy, and the pursuit of property ownership. John Updike’s “Rabbit Angstrom” quartet follows one man’s uneasy passage through postwar America with all the lust, failure, and spiritual confusion of fatherhood. John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” is a trilogy that paints a fragmented, panoramic portrait of American ambition and disenchantment between the world wars, and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy” chronicles the loneliness and beauty of two young cowboys moving through an American frontier in decline.
Then there’s John Cheever’s “Wapshot Chronicles,” which captures the rebellion of two young men from south of Boston who grow up to discover the world has no place for them. And Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full” satirizes the sometimes fragile, sometimes triumphant American male ego in its quest for power and respect in an unstable society.
There are some novels that may not appear on any top-100 list but that have stayed with me: Henry Miller’s “Black Spring,” an R-rated book that’s really about the ecstasy of being alive; John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” a luminous novel about family, myth, and time; Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” and Iris Murdoch’s “The Black Prince,” which remind us that the male psyche is often best illuminated by female genius.
To close out with some humor: Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat,” Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” and Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” — three novels that have helped me take life a bit less seriously.
I view literature not as an escape or eccentricity but as a way of understanding life. And I’ve noticed, more and more, that other men see it as strange, an unusual affectation rather than a central part of adulthood. That strikes me as a loss. Not just for them but for all of us.