The Loneliest Hobby

Or: why nobody took Ian McEwan’s free novels.

Twenty years or so back, the author Ian McEwan and his son schlepped a pile of free books down to a park in London and did their level best to give them all away. The women they approached were delighted but the men, however, couldn’t have been less interested. In fact, they weren’t able to give away a single novel to a guy, leading to McEwan coming to his infamous conclusion that “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

To be honest, though, I’ve always thought there might be a more obvious, less apocalyptic, conclusion to what was going on there. Because surely the point was that women thought it was a nice thing for a rando stranger to hand them a book in a park, whereas men found it to be... more than a little weird.

The wider point though, and the one I’ll be focusing on today, is that I actually think that the men weren’t refusing books. They were rejecting something else entirely…

Let me explain. You see, we know from Nielsen BookScan data that men make up less than 20% of the readership for the top ten bestselling titles by female authors. On the other hand, the readership for bestselling titles by male authors was 56% men and 44% women. Essentially, women will read anything by everybody, whereas men will tend to stick in a male-authored lane. And, crucially, they read in that lane alone.

Women tend to read as part of a shared experience culture. They have all these clubs and group chats and ‘For You’ pages filled with recommendations. Men’s reading, on the other hand, is more of a private habit with no concrete infrastructure built around it. And, unsurprisingly, that approach has very little room in it for being handed out books by strange men in parks.

Oh, and it’s probably worth stressing at this point that the pool is emptying out at the supply end too. A recent Creative Australia study found that the share of professional writers who are male fell from 55% in 1988 to 17% in 2023. Nice. Whatever else that stat proves, it’s not a vibrant male literary culture that a teenage boy looks at and thinks, ah, I have found my people…

One of the key reasons for this is, as the sociologist Gary Alan Fine highlights, that “reading is a status game. The books one reads, or admits to reading, rub off on one’s reputation.” And, if reading has a public face to it, then women have spent far more time establishing spaces where that status game gets played. The book club. Bookstagram. BookTok. Guys, on the other hand, tend to “experience little relatability” when they turn to those forums. And, if the BookTok juggernaut runs on seeing someone like you love a book, then men have been popping in and not seeing anyone that’s like them at all.

Men’s reading has no team.

The obvious point, in response, though, is that maybe men just like it that way. That we’re solitary readers. Rugged. Strong and silent. The a library of one. It’s a lovely theory but in 2013, Xiaoying Wu and colleagues disproved it when they ran a study in schools that concluded that “boys showed a greater boost in interest from collaborative discussions” than girls did. Boys actually benefit disproportionately from reading socially, yet boys are the readers for whom precious little social reading structure exists.

There’s a Reddit thread on r/books where the top comment (with three and a half thousand upvotes) opens “as a man none of my friends read” and we see the same in the r/litrpg crowd I write about most weeks where tens of thousands of mostly male readers spend time recommending, arguing, ranking and reviewing books. It’s a book club that would never call itself one, and it’s one of the few places on the internet where a man recommending a novel to another man is a completely unremarkable thing.

Which brings me back to that park.

You see, I think if you offer a man a novel from inside a community, he will take it. Thus, McEwan’s mistake wasn’t in trying to give free books to guys. It’s that he was a stranger, offering them membership of nothing.

Sources:

Julian Novitz, ‘A New Publisher Will Focus on Books by Men. Are Male Writers and Readers Under Threat?’, World.edu, 7 May 2025.

Gary Alan Fine and Shannon K. Fitzsimons, ‘The Secret Lives of Readers’, Society, 47 (2010), 353–55.

Jeroen Dera, Suzanne Brouwer and Anouk Welling, ‘#BookTok’s Appeal on Ninth-Grade Students’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 67.2 (2023), 99–110.

Xiaoying Wu, Richard C. Anderson, Kim Nguyen-Jahiel and Brian Miller, ‘Enhancing Motivation and Engagement Through Collaborative Discussion’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 105.3 (2013), 622–32.

Matthias Eck, Juliane Hencke, Alec Kennedy, Sabine Meinck and Justine Sass, Why Boys May Need More Support in Building Their Reading Motivation, Confidence, and Engagement, IEA Compass: Briefs in Education, 25 (Amsterdam: IEA, 2024).

‘The real problem isn’t that men don’t read’, r/books, 2023.