/lit/ - Literature

>>5092557

Good choices. I'm studying abroad in Japan this fall. The department is wonderful. Really glad to see more people with similar interests coming. One thing I've been trying to do for awhile is start a really good film club. We have one, and they show decent films, but meet too infrequently, like once a month. And I'm a total film junkie so this is not enough for me.

>THE novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional response. The novel that means most to women is about deeply held feelings and a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion.

>Jardine said women named a "much richer and more diverse" set of novels than men. There was a much broader mix between contemporary and classic works and between male and female authors. "We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do," Jardine said. "They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals."

>Women readers used much-loved books to support them through difficult times and emotional turbulence. They tended to employ them as metaphorical guides to behaviour, or as support and inspiration. "The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading," she said. Ideas touching on isolation and "aloneness" were strong among the men's "milestone" books.

>The researchers also found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men leant towards the stiff covers of hardback books.

>"We were completely taken aback by the results," said Jardine, who admitted they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliche - women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men nominating novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle. She was also surprised, she said, "by the firmness with which many men said that fiction didn't speak to them". For instance, the historian David Starkey said: "I fear fiction, of any sort, has never worked on me like that … Is that perhaps interesting in itself?"

>Jardine said the research suggested the literary world was run by the wrong people. "What I find extraordinary is the hold the male cultural establishment has over book prizes like the Booker, for instance, and in deciding what is the best. This is completely at odds with their lack of interest in fiction. On the other hand, the Orange Prize for Fiction [which honours women authors] is still regarded as ephemeral."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/take-it-as-read-men-prefer-angst/2006/04/06/1143916650116.html?page=fullpage