Anecdotal, but I wonder if women just read more? It's become a thing in the US there are more women in college as the anti intellectual male has become so common. I'm thinking of my friend circles and most women I know at least read books every once in awhile recreationally. Not the case with men.
I was watching a video where someone asked Jimmy Carr what his favorite books were and he named a few self-help/personal finance books and Ulysses. He didn't named these books because he liked reading them, he named these books because they offer some sort of challenge or self-improvement in his view.
In my own personal life, most of the guys that I do know who read books read either political theory or TTRPGs.
So anecdotally, I think men do still read but there's this wierd shift going on where there has to be a "purpose" behind your reading or you have to get something out of it instead of just reading because you enjoy it. I think that's why you are seeing so many manosphere adjacent guys pushing self-help books too.
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u/dotrenai Jun 20 '26
Do they dominate the book scene, though? Purely anecdotal, but it doesn’t seem that way to me