Melville House Books

As Alice Waugh relayed in an earlier report on Moby, “some investigations…found that around 20 million British people, a third of the population, are intimidated by the book trade. In many families reading is perceived to be alien and unattractive, a hobby for ‘people who don’t know how to live.’”

In his New Yorker profile of Ian McEwan (February 23, 2009) Daniel Zalewski reports that the writer has corroborated the survey results with his own experiment: “He and his younger son, Greg, handed out thirty novels in a nearby park. In an essay for the Guardian, McEwan reported that ‘every young woman we approached . . . was eager and grateful to take a book,’ whereas the men ‘could not be persuaded. “Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks, mate, but no.”‘ The researcher’s conclusion: ‘When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.’”

According to the National Endowment for the Arts‘ “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” released in January, so-called “literary reading” had increased among American men for the first time since 1982. The percentage of men doing literary reading still lagged behind that of women, however, 41.9% to 58% of approximately 112 million Americans.

Still, anecdotal evidence suggests that McEwan is not far from the mark: “I’ve read at least 100 books in the past year. Seriously. Probably more like 150 to 200,” a [woman] named Phyllis is quoted as saying on a blog in this NPR story. “My husband? I’m guessing zero….”