How men can reject Trump's crude masculinity and rediscover their richer selves

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.
At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read Northanger Abbey.
Men are reading less. Women make up 80 per cent of fiction sales. 'Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,' David J. Morris wrote in a New York Times essay titled 'The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.'
The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there's a popular Instagram account called 'Hot Dudes Reading.'
Some of the most charming encounters I've had with men were about books.
Mike Nichols once turned to me at a dinner in Los Angeles and told me his favourite novel was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. I was startled because I have read that book over and over, finding it a great portrait of a phenomenon that is common in politics. Someone makes a wrong move and is unable to recover, slipping into a shame spiral. (This does not apply to Donald Trump.)
I went to interview Tom Stoppard in Dorset a few years ago. The playwright has no computer and is not on social media. He writes with a Caran d'Ache fountain pen with a six-sided barrel.
Stoppard had a romantic-looking bookcase full of first editions of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. He complained that his book collection was regularly raided by 'American burglars.'