Men should read more books. Specifically, books that aren’t called Rich Dad, Poor Dad or The Diary Of A CEO. When it comes to fiction, the ‘gender gap in reading’ is consistently widening, with surveys indicating that women account for 80% of fiction sales in the UK, US and Canada.
Yet there is so much excellent fiction that explores the male experience, waiting to be discovered. All five of the books listed here explore themes of modern masculinity in different ways. They’re novels which I’d recommend to anyone – of any gender – looking to expand their horizons and read more books that question what it really means to ‘be a man’.
1. Glass Houses by Francesca Reece
For better or worse, men traditionally derive a lot of their self-worth from their work. Francesca Reece’s Glass Houses isn’t explicitly a book about men at work but it is, in part, about the fear and loneliness which one man faces at the precipice of losing his. Forester Gethin Thomas is a man who spends most of his life in the woods of north Wales – it’s where he feels most at home, and most himself. And it’s in those woods, as society threatens to smother Gethin’s livelihood, that his world is turned upside down by the return of his shimmering first love, Olwen. A satisfying and affecting narrative wrapped in Reece’s immaculate sentences.
2. Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson
A novel that really taps into what it’s like being trapped in the head (and body) of a teenage boy. It’s not all armpits, bodily fluids and angst, though. It’s a beautiful exploration of the all-encompassing nature of friendship, specifically male friendship, and the devastating speed at which grief can derail your life. The story follows two teenagers, Theron and Jake, as they grow up and apart from one another. Thompson paints a nuanced and understanding portrait of love and bisexuality while underlining how everything from the people you know to the music you listen to as a teenager can brand themselves indelibly on your sense of self.
3. All That Man Is by David Szalay
This is a collection of nine short stories that get to the meat of what it means to ‘be a man’, as well as what it’s like to exist in that weird, often cramped and uncomfortable, space between a boy and a man. Szalay specialises in the kind of simple, unpretentious writing that grabs you by the ventricles of your heart like the lapels of an ill-fitting jacket. At times uncomfortable (but never cruel) in its depictions of loneliness, All That Man Is is a must-read for anyone who has ever found themselves feeling a little isolated from the world.
4. The Young Team by Graeme Armstrong
Everyone wants to fit in. But what happens when you realise you no longer want to fit in with the people you’re surrounded by? Written in North Lanarkshire dialect, The Young Team is a visceral and engrossing novel about Glaswegian gang culture. Armstrong’s writing captures what it’s like to be a young, angry man in a way most novels could only dream of. Yet, in spite of the constant violence and disenfranchisement experienced by the characters in the text, there’s a chewy core of hope at the centre of The Young Team to latch onto.
5. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
When James Baldwin presented his publishers at Knopf with the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room they told him to “burn it”. I’m very glad he didn’t. The novel is, on its surface, about an American man living in Paris, but it was Baldwin’s unflinching exploration of racial and sexual identity within it that made publishers squirm. Giovanni’s Room might have come out in 1956 but the universal topics which Baldwin writes about – such as love, manhood, and desire – are just as relevant today as they were back then. The ending will destroy you. Beautifully, but devastatingly so.
