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While women openly shared key 'watershed' moments in the survey, the authors found greater reluctance amongst men who, according to one male participant, did not want to admit to having had a 'watershed' moment with a female interviewer and many men approached did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices.
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Favourite Novels amongst Women
The top titles that emerged varied. They ranged from The "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" to "Catch 22", "Gone With The Wind", "Rebecca", "Heart of Darkness" and "The Golden Notebook". This was alongside such perennial favourites as "Jane Eyre" (the most popular by a distinct margin), "Mrs Dalloway", "Wuthering Heights", "Pride and Prejudice", "Middlemarch" and "Anna Karenina". Jeanette Winterson's ""Passion and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit", Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" were also popular answers.
Ultimately out of the 400 women interviewed, 200 titles were given as 'watershed' books.
Favourite Novels amongst Men
Some clear favourites amongst men included Albert Camus's "The Outsider" also known as "The Stranger", Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude", J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Ry"e and K. Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five".
The final top 20 of men's reading clearly shows a majority of books with strong active narrative themes - books that might traditionally be described at quintessential boys' books. According to Jardine and Walker, men's reading choices tend to identify themselves with novels that include intellectual struggle. Personal vulnerability is represented as a more or less angst-ridden struggle against convention, a sense of isolation from social normality. Catastrophe and the struggle to rise above circumstance characterise the plots. This may have something to do with the age when men's formative reading occured - between the ages of 12 and 20, specifically 15 and 16.
"For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence."
In addition, the authors found strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty.
Key Gender Differences - Results
- Only four titles were shared between the women's and men's top 20, and there was no overlap at all in the top five.
- For men, a sense of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager was mentioned. George Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in the survey of women's reading.
- Men use fiction almost physically as a guide to negotiate a difficult journey (but would rarely admit to this being the case).
- Women use novels metaphorically - the build-up to an emotional crisis and subsequent denouement in a novel such as Jane Eyre might have helped negotiate an emotional progress through a difficult divorce, or provided support during a difficult period at work, or provided solace when things seemed generally dull.
- Six male authors made it into the women's top 20.
- Only one woman has made it on to the men's: Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird).
- Both women and men replied that the gender of the author played no role in their reading choice. But men were more specific and literal about the kind of plot and character they were interested in reading about. This may have produced an accidental concentration on male authors, for "adventure" and "triumphing over adversity" fiction. Men who continued reading fiction into maturity became increasingly open to novels by women - Iris Murdoch was a particular favourite.
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