Attention, men! Pick up a book, reading is sexy

It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.

- Maureen Dowd

At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read Northanger Abbey.

Men are reading less. Women make up 80% of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”.

The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called “Hot Dudes Reading”.

Some of the most charming encounters I've had with men were about books.

Mike Nichols once turned to me at a dinner in Los Angeles and told me his favourite novel was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. I was startled because I have read that book over and over, finding it a great portrait of a phenomenon that is common in politics. Someone makes a wrong move and is unable to recover, slipping into a shame spiral. (This does not apply to Donald Trump.)

I went to interview Tom Stoppard in Dorset a few years ago. The playwright has no computer and is not on social media. He writes with a Caran d’Ache fountain pen with a six-sided barrel.