official arbiters of quality
According to a study from the University of London, men and women have different tastes in literature. This shouldn’t be too surprising, except that most men apparently have no taste in literature at all. A Sydney Morning Herald story (via Tim O’Reilly) says most men have little interest in reading fiction between the ages of 20 and 50, and the books they cite as influences tend to be brooding stories of alienation associated with the teenage years. At first, this struck me as a little wacky, since I’m a man and I was an English major, but I realized I more or less quite reading fiction when I finished college. My tastes quickly turned to computer magazines (of course, I had a job at a computer magazine) and later blogs. I do try to read fiction during school breaks, but I wonder if the Don DeLillo books I enjoy still fall into the category of adolescent lit.
