There is a solution to the Male Reading Crisis, but it is boring.

That’s the thing about reading advice: the good stuff, the stuff that actually works, is boring.

Over on YouTube, I recently released a video with the rather boring title ‘How to Start Reading Again.’ It was aimed at people who, as you can tell from the title, want to start reading again. I recommended a few things, like:

• Prioritizing short and fun books at first.

• Reading before you go to bed.

• Slowing down so you can really enjoy the experience.

Which is, admittedly, all fairly boring advice.

That’s the thing about reading advice: the good stuff, the stuff that actually works, is boring. That’s because reading is gloriously resistant to hacks and shortcuts; in fact, attempting to make it ‘easier’ or ‘faster’ or ‘less work’ destroys the activity. At some point, you simply aren’t reading anymore.

This fact is a sad one if you are a YouTuber like me, chasing the whims of an audience and an algorithm that responds to energy, crisis, and surprise. But it is true, and that’s the important part.

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In the middle section of the video, I turned my attention to the so-called Male Reading Crisis.¹ I would define the Male Reading Crisis simply: men, more so than women, have stopped reading.

As soon as you say this, you expect to get a certain variety of negative comments. It is difficult to talk about a problem particular to one sex without many people of many persuasions having something to say — often before they’ve finished your video.

And it turns out that I did get all of those sorts of comments! Yet, most people who responded – men and women – seemed to take what I said in good faith. They too think there is a problem. They’d like to fix it. Men do read less than women, and if we want to fix this (based on the assumption that reading is a good thing to do) we need to take a look at the problem from many angles. Maybe a solution will present itself.

As I’ve thought about the Male Reading Crisis, I’ve tried to take seriously all the common explanations. Very broadly, they fall into two groups:

• Men have given up on reading because it has become an increasingly female-coded activity. This is sometimes described as male flight. I think we could also group this with the further observation to the effect that men spend their leisure time with other forms of media, like video games, and so have abandoned reading to a greater degree than women.

• The publishing industry, especially in fiction (and especially in certain areas of fiction), sees women as its primary customers. Some would-be writers report being rejected for being men or for writing about men, either because agents/editors aren’t interested or because they don’t think the books will sell.² This is what is sometimes described as publishing abandoning men.

I think both of these broad explanations have some truth to them, which makes finding a solution seem rather difficult. We would have to change men’s behavior and get publishers to care? But maybe they aren’t so unrelated.

If you look at these, you’ll notice that they implicitly place blame on one group or another. And that might be the most frustrating part about discussions of the Male Reading Crisis: nobody cares about solutions, they just want to apportion blame.

I have a two-year-old son, Teddy. I have a daughter, Aletheia, who will born in the next few months. I expect Teddy and Aletheia will both read a lot, regardless of the difference in sex. This is a reasonable expectation, I think, because I see how much control I have over what my son enjoys doing. Namely, he learns to love things by seeing other people enjoy them. He wants to share in the fun. I expect that for Aletheia, it will be mostly the same — sure, each kid comes preloaded with preferences and tendencies, but the basic architecture is the same.

Teddy goes to the library several times a week with his mom; when my schedule allows, I go with them. There are plenty of books there, but Teddy likes to go the table with the iPads that has puzzle games. He looks forward to solving the puzzles (and I think his puzzle-solving abilities are quite impressive). At first, we were worried about this, because we were taking him to the library for the books. Yet, he didn’t care about books.

How do you solve that problem?

We realized that part of the problem was that Teddy sees our phones all the time. He at least sees us holding them as we walk around, and he notices the outlines in our pockets sometimes. Teddy saw that we turned to screens for entertainment, and he wanted to do the same.

This might sound surprising to you, because I am (forgive me) a Professional Reader. I think that is the best way to describe what I do: I read books and I talk about them online. But Teddy doesn’t see that. I do my reading in my office or in my armchair after he has gone to bed. Teddy doesn’t see me reading. The same could be said for my wife, who reads late into the night. We are a house of readers, but he wouldn’t know that.

So, we made a change. We started to read more conspicuously. I started showing him the books I was reading. We read to him even more often, and certainly not just at bedtime. Within a week or two, Teddy was looking forward to the library for a very different reason. He was looking forward to picking out new books.

I went to the library with him last Saturday. I got to see him push the books into the return slot, one at a time, while the conveyor belt carried them back into the sorting room. He loved it. Then he ran inside, took me to the children’s area, and showed me the rows of books.

The iPad puzzles came later, but I don’t mind that so much.

The Reaper

I think that adult psychology is not that different from child psychology, except perhaps that adults are much better at self-deception. We love a good rationalization. The relative simplicity of a child’s mind necessitates a certain honesty.

And when it comes to the Male Reading Crisis, I think we may have entered rationalization territory. We want comprehensive, structural explanations, preferably with a well-defined villain, for what is a rather boring continuation of long-running trends.

Men stopped reading for many small reasons. But eventually, men stopped reading because men stopped reading. As more and more men dropped out of literary life, younger boys lacked exemplars to imitate. The men around them didn’t read, so they didn’t read either.

My parents didn’t read much, though they always encouraged me to read. But my grandfather read voraciously. He had every Louis L’Amour novel, and he’d read them all many times.

We’d go to the library and he’d pick out a book, always a Western. Sometimes I’d ask him if he’d already read that one. ‘Yes,’ he’d usually say, ‘but maybe they changed the ending.’ Then we’d walk out together, maybe on our way to get ice cream, each of us holding a few books.

I became a reader because many adults around me were readers, or they encouraged reading (sometimes forcefully). Books were always an option for me. When I was sixteen, my father took me to a bookstore. I asked for a Koran and a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report; I was determined to get to the bottom of the most pressing problem in the world, I guess, and I had to start somewhere. My father, a self-described fundamentalist Baptist, bought them for me without question.

All of this adds up to the boring solution to the Male Reading Crisis.

Boys at Play

If men stopped reading because men stopped reading, then the way for men to start reading is for men to start reading.

Men who already read should keep doing what they’re doing — but they should also make a point of encouraging others to read. You can do this in a number of ways. When adult friends of mine have a birthday, I get them two gifts. One is likely to be a bottle of wine, whiskey, or something similar. The second is a book. I expect that no more than half of the books I have given as gifts have been read, but I know for a fact that at least some of them have been relished.

I do the same thing for younger kids. A friend’s son just turned 13. I bought him a Lego set and a copy of Ender’s Game. From what his dad tells me, he’s not much of a reader — but maybe this will be the book that changes that. You never know.

It goes beyond gifts, however. Talking about books, making recommendations, and simply carrying a book with you wherever you go (something you should do anyway, as you’ll be able to read more). Eventually, people start initiating those bookish conversations with you, including people who didn’t seem that interested in reading before.

If people see you enjoying something, they want to join in on the fun. Just like Teddy at the library, if people see you enjoying what you read, they will want to give it a shot.

If you’re concerned that publishers still aren’t catering to male readers, fear not: there are many great books out there you can recommend. Some of them were even written in the last five years. And if male readership rates were to increase substantially, I guarantee the industry would respond. They aren’t going to leave those dollars on the table.

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That’s the boring truth about reading and the Male Reading Crisis, I’m afraid. To get more men to read, we need more men reading.

Really, though, we need more people reading. Literacy and reading rates have declined steadily for years now. It is a multi-faceted problem that goes well beyond men putting down Westerns and playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the fifth time.

If you want to help solve that problem, you’ll need to get reading.

This conclusion lacks drama. There is no sense of heroism. If you follow this advice, you won’t feel like you’re doing anything (except, of course, reading some good books). It is boring. But more importantly, I think it is true.

1. As I note in the video, I don’t love the ‘crisis’ label, just as I don’t love talk of the ‘literacy crisis.’ That’s because these aren’t new, sudden problems. They’ve developed over decades. But I have to sometimes use common terminology and set aside my quibbles.

2. This is very difficult to get numbers on. It is true that agents do sometimes screen authors based on identity — I recall once looking at fiction agents’ sites and seeing lots of indications of this. Yet, there are men getting published! I read them! Unfortunately, what is happening is a heated exchange of anecdotes. How do you possibly adjudicate this dispute?