Opinion: Self-help books aren’t the answer to the male reading crisis

“Reading is a less common hobby than it used to be” is a sentiment most people share, likely because it is a reality that stares us in the face, quite demandingly, throughout our day-to-day lives. Anecdotally, I’m sure many of us can recall times when the question “What was the last book you read?” was met with chuckling and a surprisingly shameless reference to a children’s story we enjoyed as third-graders in a school library.

I’m also sure it wouldn’t shock anyone reading this to hear that statistics back up this idea. A recent study published in iScience looked at over 20 years of reading data from the American Time Use Study, and found that daily reading, simply for pleasure, has fallen by more than 40% in the last 20 years.

But to me, it’s not the crisis itself that lacks a logical explanation. Reading is an attention-oriented hobby, and we live in a time when attention has become a currency harder to earn than ever. Everyone has access to an endless amount of entertainment and distractions on their cell phones. Through social media, the content we consume is filtered to support instant gratification through jump cuts, ten-second videos and an intentionally designed, endless feed of short-form content.

Reading as a form of entertainment is, in many ways, the antithesis of short-form content. It demands you shut off the possibility of other distractions or forms of leisure and be fully present to experience the words on a page, spending minutes, hours, days or weeks at a time to fully get what you’ve paid for out of a novel.

What I have found disappointing and somewhat confusing, however, is the response from a large portion of men. The decline in reading has been even more prevalent among males, with the NEA’s most recent flagship survey showing that 46.9% of women read a novel or short story in 2022, compared to just 27.7% of men.

It is not shocking that plenty of young men — in what I see as an era of conservative, discipline-focused attitudes that dominate many popular male subcultures and online spaces — are aware of this decline in reading. It is also, in the same vein, not at all shocking that many of these young men are looking to push back, to return to the ‘good old days’ of the well-rounded male.

But when these men attempt to refine their lives, to rediscover and reestablish the articulate, well-read man in modern society, what exactly are they being told to read? The answer lies in how that very culture of male self-improvement frames reading: a tool for self-optimization.

The memoirs of motivational speakers, books that promise the secrets behind self-improvement hacks, optimizing productivity, ‘Having a Hard Time Being a Human? Here’s How to Get Rich and Jacked in Just Two Months!’ are enticing to male readers. If there’s a self-help bestseller with an author who uses a masculine, give-it-to-you-straight diction along with a catchy title, you’ll likely find one of your male friends, even the most well-meaning and genuine of the lot, seeking it out as an answer to his realization that he does not read enough.

And if, for whatever reason, these books end up being effective on your journey to restoring a healthy reading habit, then I’m all for that. That would mean, I would hope, that you enjoyed the contents of the book itself — whether it was the prose, the information, the author’s perspective, or any combination of these factors — and that you were able to engage with the material and hold your attention as you read.

That’s completely acceptable. If books of this sort are what you like, I believe that’s a beautiful thing. The problem I’ve noticed, however, is that many men who try to pull themselves out of their decade-long reading slumps end up forcing themselves to read what they simply do not enjoy, with some of these books containing brutal spiels on the importance of a firm handshake in job interviews, repetitious passages on speaking more clearly or standing up straighter.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty of advice in these sorts of books that can be constructively applied to your life, that could even improve future relationships or prepare you for obstacles you’ll inevitably face in your adulthood. It’s that a majority of young men will already endure others’ pontificating on these topics as they grow older.

Discipline is a powerful thing. Training your mind and body to obey your own practices, despite all of the screaming reasons that beg you to do otherwise, is an important part of becoming who you want to be. And reading, teaching your attention span to surrender solely and entirely to the words written by an author, is an activity that will require it. If I could advise any young men like myself who want to strive towards being more active as thinkers — men who want to learn how to be more understanding of others and work towards being more familiar with the world around them — it would be that you should approach reading as a reward, rather than a discipline.

There is no quicker way to stick to a habit than to enjoy it. And luckily for all of us, a novel can be one of the most rewarding ways to spend your time. You may not love everything you read — you’ll sit through stories that go in entirely different directions than you would have liked and endure prose you find obnoxious or dull — but you’ll learn something about yourself with each one.

I remember realizing I wasn’t particularly drawn to some of Stephen King’s famous works. “It” was a drag to me, and I found “Misery” to be underwhelming in the back half. I stared at thousands of five-star reviews and declared to myself, with complete sureness, that I thought they were wrong. Obviously, I’m in the minority there — and while I can recognize the brilliance in King’s storytelling, what mattered was that my takeaway from his books was my own, and no one else’s. I learned something about myself. I was forming my own taste.

And when — and you must trust me when I use the word when, because I promise you with complete certainty that it will happen — you find a novel that truly grips you, one that you find yourself reaching for at any moment you get to squeeze in a few more pages, you will be rewarded in ways you could not have previously imagined. You’ll see parts of yourself you never thought you’d find outside your own head — moments and characters will cling to your thoughts and shape how you view the people you meet and the experiences you live through, in entirely new ways. Not simply because they’re completely new to you, but often because they’ll resonate with you so deeply it feels as though you’ve welcomed back a part of yourself you’d previously forgotten.

My point is that you’ll be told, in a variety of ways and to varying degrees of effectiveness, the importance of making eye contact with your boss when he speaks to you, or how standing with a masculine posture might help you appear a more authoritative figure to others. These are things that the world will likely beat into you by the time you’re leaving your twenties.

What they won’t exactly teach you with such haste, however, is what many men, and people as a whole, lack to a frustrating degree today. To quote the legendary writer James Baldwin, “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive.”

The parting word here is empathy. Reading a novel will mold you into a more empathetic person, toward yourself and others. And it is with that empathy that you will be able to approach the rest of your life with a clearer lens than you ever would have before. Is there anything more self-improving than that?