Mars and Venus?

anton makes a fascinating point about reading here.

Think about Roth, Bellow. Not just how women are incidental or a vehicle for the man's story to be told, but how their work is about the brash, bright public world, how the city, the political, is always there, something that impinges on their lives. None of that stifling domesticity, claustrophobic insistence on feelings. This is where the action is. Even Salter, you think, is a man's writer.

Is this a parody, a piss take? Not so sure. Here's Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses.

Also, it seems that men are a lot less likely to finish a book than women (who are page turners).

Whilst women like a range of books it appears that most men largely read books by men. Here's the list:

The Outsider by Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I'm sure if you did a list of top films you'd get something similar (Godfather, Shawshank, etc., for men).

Okay, just a small anecdote that confirms this: today at the main Watersotnes. A table with books under the title: 'the Great american Novel' . 19/20 were male writers! (Updike, Roth, Yates, Pynchon, Salinger, DeLillo, Ellis, Fitzgerald, Franzen, Steinbeck (no Bellow, for some odd reason)...)