Where Have All the Men Gone?

 

Shelf Awareness recently featured a discussion about the importance of book groups to the publishing world, and one of the questions pondered was, "Why don't more men join book groups?"

"Fact is, like it or not, men just don't share their feelings easily," Mary Alice Gorman, owner of Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont, Pennsylvania, observed. "Book groups often fall into discussion of how they feel about what they read. Let's face it, the shared experience of growing up to be a woman in this culture bonds these groups in a unique way and is the reason they go on for so long."

Random House New England district sales manager Ann Kingman added, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that people often "join a book group for the social aspect in the beginning. As for men? I have no idea. I hear a rumor that a man is coming to our next book group. I'll let you know how that goes."

There's just no clear answer, says novelist Joshua Henkin: "One thing I've been struck by is that, though some women when I ask them say that they wouldn't want their husbands/men in general in their book groups, others say they'd be happy to but that the men they know aren't interested or don't read fiction, and that seems to me a shame."

Valerie Koehler's Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston has a book group called "Couples & Bob, senior couples and one widower. She says, "I don't know why more men don't join book groups. The men in my life are nonfiction readers by and large and I don't know if the discussion can be as lively as it can be when you are dissecting a completely made up world."

There are a few bright spots. Marie Leahy, Northshire Bookstore's marketing director, notes that "men in book groups have not been in short supply since my time here. When we had a book group evening with Random House in February, about 15% of the 80 or so participants were men."

And the book club that Ami Greko, marketing director for Folio Literary Management, belongs to "has more men than women, and we have yet (thank god) to read a biography of a Civil War general."

(Photo credit goes to The Men's Book Club of Canada—another bright spot.)