I think one key detail here is “girls and boys”. These are young people 5-18 at an age where they have to read, and already the disparity is creeping in. It also goes on to note that, pre pandemic, reading enjoyment had reached a 15-year low, and any pandemic-related gain in enjoyment had been eroded by 2022. “This was particularly true for children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and for boys within this group.”
That does not seem to me to be a happy trajectory. And the fact that disadvantaged boys are reading less than any other group, when it is the disadvantaged overall who stand to gain most from literacy and reading, really is a source of sadness to me, and I wish it could be different. That is my entire argument, wrapped up in one statistic.
I’m not sure how YouGov compiled their figures so I’m not going to question the findings, beyond expressing a little general skepticism as to the nature of such polls — sample size, sample selection, length of study, self-reported behaviour and so on.
I also (defensively? Almost certainly!) note that men go on to read proportionately more non-fiction that fiction. I’m not mocking that; I’m one of those men who has re-read Beevor’s STALINGRAD more often than might seem strictly necessary to an impartial observer. But really, I was thinking about the polyphonic nature of fiction, and how fervently I believe it would be wonderful if more young men read more of it.
Of course you can’t make young people read if they don’t want to and indeed, as you say, look at my own younger son. He grew up in a home that might as well been made of books, including walls of comic books, old and new. But the Playstation was his go-to.
But what I believe one can do, if one is sufficiently old fashioned, and has that insufferable streak of Fabianism, is to lobby to provide an environment such that young men are encouraged to read, as much as such a thing might be possible — and that this effort should involve engaging young men with books they might actually enjoy, rather than books we believe to be “good” for them, and we should be doing this as early as possible. (Roald Dahl understood this. He knew that snot was intrinsically hilarious.)
All of which is to say, it’s readers who interest me. The gender split of publishers and authors is of no ultimate consequence. The books are the thing. I mean, the two authors who I believe introduced more young people to a lifetime of reading than any other are Stephen King and JK Rowling.
I was not an admirer, still less a reader, of Harry Potter per se — and indeed I’d get all pompous and self-righteously irritable when I saw an adult reading one on the tube, because I was younger and a bit more stupid — but I like to at least imagine that as many boys as girls were swept up in the genuine joy of that phenomenon. (Insert books/magic gag.)
I get that you’re not concerned, and I also get that I’m fighting a hopless, reargard action that is tied up with my class politics, because I believe books to be a force for empowerment and indeed liberation. I also know that I’m self-relating: I know how discovering books opened up the world for me, made it bigger and wider and stranger and full of unguessed possibility. But once upon a time, I was a bookseller. I loved it more than I can express. When I worked in trade publishing, I ran a sales department. I loved selling books. I loved evangelising for them. I loved being part of introducing people to new books, and new authors and new worlds. I still do. Can’t help it. It’s in my blood.
