This is the 239th edition of SHuSH, the official newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, push the button:
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According to a survey by the National Endowment of the Arts, only 40 percent of American men read books in 2022, down about 4 percent from 2017. The number of women reading books was down, too, but only to 57 percent.
There are probably a lot of reasons men are reading less than women. I want to concentrate on one, admitting up front that I have no actual evidence that it’s part of the problem. It just bothers me.
There are few good male celebrity book influencers.
Women have a lot of impressive women telling them what to read. Oprah tops the list, followed by Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush, newcomer Dua Lipa, and literal hordes of Bookstagramers and BookTokers. They take their roles seriously. They aren’t just making recommendations, but running book clubs. They have staffs dedicated to helping them identify the best new books (predominantly fiction) before they’re released. They work on predictable schedules, on multiple platforms, and they’ve attracted enormous audiences.
On the men’s side are a handful of impressive individuals who seem to like to read but can’t be arsed to run an actual book club, or to keep up with new releases, or really do anything beyond tweet or blog an occasional list of books they want you to know they’ve read.
Of them all, Bill Gates is probably the most serious reader, fifty books a year, mostly nonfiction. He drops his favourites on his blog whenever he feels like it, which isn’t often. They tend to reflect what Bill’s interested in at the moment. For a while it was education, then it was fighting diseases and global health, more recently it’s been climate and energy.
If you happen to share one of Bill’s enthusiasms, he’s great. When he starts reading about a subject, he goes deep: he’ll be recommending obscure titles, textbooks, all kinds of shit. This makes Bill typical of the male influencers. They read less for pleasure or to expand their horizons than for actionable insights. That’s a perfectly legitimate reason to read, but also a narrow one. Most male influencers are narrow.
When Bill gets outside his enthusiasms, his choices are pedestrian and he has nothing of interest to say about them. In a piece about his all-time favourite books, he mentions Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. “It’s just very well-written,” says Bill. “It’s very readable, and you do get a sense of a pretty special person.”
That’s the literary equivalent of “it’s got a nice beat, you can dance to it.”
All the tycoons who claim to read are predictable in their choices. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson. A lot of nonfiction, a lot of business, social science, and popular science with actionable insights—Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.
They also like short books that reduce complex phenomena to simple formulae: Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; anything by Malcolm Gladwell. And they’re suckers for hero worship of the Walter Isaacson variety. I haven’t read all of Isaacson, but I get his appeal to this crowd: whether he’s writing about Einstein, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, his books aren’t biographies so much as breezy, extended Fortune magazine articles that try to leave readers with more of those actionable insights.
These guys are also quick to recommend books by friends or associates, or about themselves, regardless of merit. No one takes this quite as far as Donald Trump, whose list is full of books about him written by his friends—along with Edward Klein’s takedown of Barack Obama, The Amateur, and, hilariously, Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated.
The tycoons only occasionally mention fiction, and then it’s usually something they read as young men: Tolkien, Puzo’s The Godfather, Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Arrested development all around.
The only recent fiction I noticed were popular sci-fi novels, Andy Weir’s The Martian or Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. Bezos, god bless him, recommended Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding—the only time one of these guys read out of his lane.
Barack Obama is different. He is at least catholic in his tastes and he appears to be reading primarily for enjoyment rather than in pursuit of an edge. His lists lean slightly to fiction over nonfiction. While he’ll occasionally reach back for something like The Quiet American or The Brothers Karamazov (he’s particular enough to specify the translation), the vast majority of his choices are new releases. He liked Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law.
The problem with Barack’s recommendations is that they’re safe. The man seems to live in fear of straying from the New York Times bestseller list. All the caution that people criticized in his administration is right here in his reading choices. There’s not a single surprise, a single dare. What’s the use of making recommendations when you’re recommending what everyone’s already reading?
The world, or at least the male reading portion of it, needs more Andrew Luck.
Unless you follow American football, you’ve probably never heard of Andrew Luck, who was on pace to be the best NFL quarterback of his generation before a series of injuries convinced him to pack it in early. He walked away from the game and hundreds of millions in potential earnings at age twenty-nine. He’s now pursuing a master’s in education, raising a family, coaching a high-school football team, and reading books.
Luck (that’s him at the top of this newsletter) comes from a smart family. His mother was a teacher and his father was a football executive. Andrew was an academic all-American at Stanford. His two sisters also attended Stanford and his younger brother went to Yale.
The great thing about Luck’s list is its unruliness.
You’ll find the usual bestsellers—Richard Powers’ Overstory, John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, Tara Westover’s Educated, Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, Andy Weir’s The Martian—but that’s pretty good range, on par with Obama’s.
It might not be surprising that an athlete reads a lot of sports books but, again, the breadth of interest is impressive: Rich Cohen’s The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse; WNBA star Tamika Catchings’ Catch a Star; Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat; Arlene Blum’s Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life; John McPhee’s tennis masterpiece Levels of the Game; and sports-related books like Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog. Notice the absence of football—Luck is never in his lane.
You’ll also find an intriguing mix of nonfiction in his recommendations: David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy; Norman Eisen’s The Last Palace: Europe’s Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House; Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari; Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion; one of Oliver Sacks’ lesser known books, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood; Edmund de Wall’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes; Jeff Guinn’s The Autobiography of Santa Claus; J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Luck is the only celebrity book influencer I’ve seen who reads across the political spectrum.
His fiction choices are similarly diverse. There’s old and new and a genuinely eclectic range of voices, most of strong quality: Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Shelton Johnson’s Gloryland; Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek; Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall; Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo; Conan Doyle’s The Hounds of the Baskervilles; Alan Grant’s Refugee; Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing; John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; James S. A. Corey’s space opera Leviathan Wakes. His all-time favorite novel is Henri Charriere’s Papillon.
And then there’s the children’s component of the Luck list. At least a third of his choices are for “rookie” readers. Here, too, he’s all over the place: Lupita Nyong’s Sulwe; Jabari Asim’s Preaching to the Chickens; Bill Peet’s Buford the Little Bighorn; Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince; Chris Ferrie’s Quantum Physics for Babies; Jelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon; a children’s edition of The Three Musketeers, E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan; and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends.
You do have to be smart to play quarterback at an elite level, just as you have to be smart to build a business empire or win a national election. But you don’t have to be well-rounded or intellectually adventurous, and most successful men aren’t. Luck is. He’s a genuine, enthusiastic, open-minded, all-over-the-bookstore reader—an example to men of all ages.
Unfortunately, he’s also a quitter. He left the NFL in mid-career, and he appears to have abandoned his monthly book recommendations mid-pandemic.
I can forgive him the first quit—the world has a lot of quarterbacks—but it doesn’t have another book influencer like Andrew Luck.
More on the audiobook anomaly
Over the last two editions of SHuSH, we’ve been trying to get at the audiobook anomaly in Canadian book sales. Either we don’t like audiobooks in Canada or the numbers of audiobook sales are underreported. We believe it’s the latter. The trouble is that there is no reliable data on which to base a conclusion. We mentioned that BookNet, the paid service that collects data on Canadian book sales, told SHuSH that it does not have access to Amazon data. Ottawa bookseller Cole Davidson wrote the other day to report the following:
According to the BookNet Canada SalesData Retailer List, Amazon DOES submit sales data. The list indicates that Amazon does not submit on hand or on order data, but does submit weekly sales data. And on a CIBA webinar last night, a BookNet representative claimed that they collect data on 85% of English language sales data in Canada. I don't see how they could get to 85% without collecting from Amazon.
Cole is right. There’s no way BookNet could be reporting 85 percent of Canadian book sales without Amazon. But BookNet was making the 85 percent claim back when it told me it wasn’t getting any Amazon data.
I’d be delighted if BookNet really is getting 85 percent of Canadian bookselling data including Amazon data—I’d resubscribe to BookNet if that was the case. I wish the service would lay it all out for us.
Meanwhile, check out Cole’s store, The Spaniel’s Tale.
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Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)
Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.
Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.
Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.
Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff
Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.
Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles: an eye on the monster.
Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)
Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different
Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion
Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world
Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations
Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice
John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations
Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading
Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.
J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.
Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”
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Tyler Cowen is a fascinating recommender. Here’s his most recent post: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/what-ive-been-reading-251.html
One “male book influencer” you didn’t mention, I think, is Tyler Cowen. His Conversations with Tyler podcast is popular and often discusses books with the author as the guest.