If we don't read to boys, no wonder men don't love books
It is undeniably true that literary fiction is now dominated by women, both on the bookshelves and behind the scenes (78 per cent of editorial roles in publishing are held by women).
Jude Cook, the writer and critic who is launching Conduit Books, says he wants to give a platform to 'overlooked narratives' by and about men. Amid all the talk of toxic masculinity, he points out, 'the subject of what young men read has become critically important'.
That does assume, of course, that young men read at all. Which they won't, if nobody teaches them. A new survey of childhood reading habits has found that Gen Z parents (aged 28 or younger) can't be bothered to read to their sons. Only 29 per cent of boys aged two or under get a daily bedtime story, compared with 44 per cent of girls.
Either way, the figures are dismal – but the boys! Those poor little future men, barely old enough to hold a spoon and already judged inferior to their sisters. In a near-perfect inversion of the old chauvinism, it is now boys who are presumed – even by their own parents – to be too empty-headed to be interested in books.
We surely don't need to rehearse here all the reasons why reading is good for young minds: the intellectual exercise, the exposure to new cultures and viewpoints, the practise of empathy. Boys, who now underperform all the way from primary school to the workplace, need more of all that. But depriving them of bedtime stories isn't just bad for their brains. Even worse, I fear, will be the effect on their hearts.
The bedtime story is a deliberate, routine, slightly tiresome act of parental love. It is the moment when, at the end of another interminable and probably quite fractious day, you choose to stay with your child a little longer. Just the two of you, squashed up, with no distractions except whichever book they insist on hearing for the thirty thousandth time. Children feel that extra dollop of love keenly: often, it becomes their defining memory of early childhood.
I think my first conscious memory of laughter comes from learning to read with my father, who substituted his own favourite words for the innocent ducks and apples in my alphabet book. 'B is for Bottyhole; C is for Coronary'.
Although a soft-hearted man, he was something of a despot when it came to books. Winnie the Pooh was dismissed as 'absolute drivel', and instead he insisted on reading me those 19th century cautionary verses in which nightmarish punishments rain down upon children who slam doors or refuse to eat soup.
At the hands of Hilaire Belloc and Heinrich Hoffmann (the German moralist who wrote Struwwelpeter) young miscreants were variously burned alive, eaten by lions, starved to death or, for the crime of thumb-sucking, parted forever from their offending digits. 'The door flew open, in he ran, the great, long, red-legged scissorman,' Dad would declaim, as I, tucked safely into his armpit, shuddered with delicious dread.
Those bedtime stories started me off on a lifetime of reading. But they also taught me deeper lessons, about who I was in my father's eyes. Not 'just a girl', but someone whose intelligence he had faith in, and whose company was worthwhile. Exactly the sort of lessons our boys need now.
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The father of a schoolfriend of mine had been in the camps and was still so traumatised that the sight of anyone in uniform, even a humble traffic warden, could cause him to panic. It is a commonplace that sons model themselves on their fathers. For boys of my generation, their fathers' war records could be a source of pride or shame. I was immensely proud of my father's service as a naval officer and remain so, even since I discovered that some of what I had been led to believe was not wholly true. (His uniform still hangs at the back of my wardrobe.) I remember the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965, a solemn occasion in which (so it seemed) the whole nation was in mourning. We accepted the myth that Churchill had promulgated: that the period after the fall of France, when Britain had stood alone against the Axis powers, had been our finest hour and that the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany made all the sacrifices worthwhile. 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He sacrifices personal happiness for the greater good. In The English Patient (1996), the moral is the opposite: the protagonist Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is willing to surrender secret maps to his German captors if they will help him to find his beloved. The contrasting messages of these two films show how far we have come.
