Do the books we read depend on the gender we're born into? Very much so, according to the results of a survey of 500 men, published today, in which they were asked to name the books that meant most to them - their 'watershed' novels. The survey came about as the result of a similar study carried out last year in which women were asked the same question.
The results could scarcely have been more stereotypical. While women went for novels with highly developed emotional lives and domestic settings, men, according to a clearly baffled Professor Lisa Jardine, one of the compilers of the survey, were "all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading." The top five books on the women's list were Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Handmaid's Tale, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice. The top five men's titles were The Outsider, Heart of Darkness, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby and Brighton Rock.
And that's not the half of it. According to an article by Prof Jardine and her fellow surveyor, Annie Watkins, men were more reluctant to discuss the influence of reading, didn't come up with anything like the range of titles that the women did, and "did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices". Only four titles were shared between the women's and men's top 20s, and only one woman - Harper Lee - cropped up on the men's list. "We were," confessed Prof Jardine, "completely taken aback".
All of which prompted a chairs-pushed-back, fist-thumping "discussion" in the office this lunchtime between me and another journalist of the male persuasion (whose modesty I shall for the time being preserve) about what, if anything, this survey told us.
My own position was that it didn't tell us anything much. The idea that men only read books by other men, and only appreciate action-thriller-plot-driven sorts of books is simply not borne out, in my experience, by the reading habits of the men I know. My boyfriend is currently deep into Hilary Mantel; my best male friend's favourite book is Wuthering Heights. I developed a passionate allegiance to Iris Murdoch because my dad wouldn't leave me alone until I read The Sea, The Sea.
My feeling was that in any survey like this, when people are asked face-to-face which books are their favourites, they tend - consciously or unconsciously - to respond with titles which they believe project the image they want others to have of them. My male interlocutor, however, blew my theory out of the water by telling me that as a man he a) preferred fiction to non-fiction, b) would choose books by men over books by women if looking along a bookshop shelf and c) only really liked stories with proper plots.
So tell me: is he plowing a lonely furrow, or am I hopelessly deluded? Does everyone apart from me notice the gender of the author whom they're reading? Were JK Rowling's publishers right to tell her to publish under her initials so as not to put off book-loving boys?
