The pressure on men to read novels can be insufferable

Most men seem to have very little curiosity about the lives of people they do not know

- MANU JOSEPH

Now and then, there is a lecture given to men about how they must read, chiefly novels. And why the fact that most of them don't read novels is yet another reason why they are not better people, like women. A few days ago the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a column entitled, 'Attention, Men: Books Are Sexy!' This headline portended a genre of advice to men—that if they did what women did, they would be more attractive. You may have also come across articles that say, 'Men: Doing chores at home is sexy' and 'Men: Listening is sexy'. Once, on a Goan beach, I was practicing yoga, or what I think is yoga, when two Western women nodded in appreciation as they walked by. What made me laugh in the warrior pose was not only their social confidence in complimenting a native practicing his own culture, but also my suspicion that what they approved of was a man doing peaceful exercises, instead of pumping iron like 'toxic men' do. I wanted to tell them I have read Sally Rooney too; they would probably have taken me out to dinner. If I said Jane Austen, they might have swooned. Dowd makes the rewards for men clearer in her NYT column: "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."

This is part of an ongoing lament about the disappearance of men who read novels. "I interviewed Ralph Fiennes, and it turned out that he loves Shakespeare and reciting Beckett at 3 a.m. under the stars," she writes, I guess in an appreciative way and not in alarm at the mental health of such a man.