"Remasculating" Reading

A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the United Kingdom found that 48% of women were "Page Turners", or regular readers, compared with 26% of men. Conversely, 32% of men were "Slow Worms", reading only one or two books a year, compared with 18% of women. Sounds like a literary brouhaha in the making! And the Guardian's bookblog is never shy about weighing into a literary brouhaha. Jean Hannah Edelstein's column reckons that "publishers need to 're-masculate' books if they want to get more men reading."

The battle of the sexes is always good for a laugh, and Edelstein's piece is tongue-in-cheek - she suggests re-packaging chick lit with blokey covers and creating a TV show with a foul-mouthed librarian. But jokes are rarely just jokes, and usually tap into some social anxiety. Edelstein's article is not a million miles away from more familiar arguments about the crisis of boys not reading. Which in turn are not a million miles away from the moral panic that attended the birth of the novel in the late eighteenth century, when a striking majority of readers were female. It's such a problem when women outperform men - even at something as facilely described as "page turning".

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2009 Miles Franklin longlist announced

The longlist for this year's $42,000 prize has been recently announced.

It is:

Addition by Toni Jordan (Text Publishing)
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Penguin Books)
Breath by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton)
Fugitive Blue by Claire Thomas (Allen & Unwin)
Ice by Louis Nowra (Allen & Unwin)
One Foot Wrong by Sofie Laguna (Allen & Unwin)
The Devil's Eye by Ian Townsend (Harper Collins)
The Pages by Murray Bail (Text Publishing)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin)
Wanting by Richard Flanagan (Alfred A Knopf)

It's a big feather in the cap for Allen & Unwin, with five books shortlisted, and a down feather for Text with two. What are Allen & Unwin doing right (if you think making the shortlist is a good thing for authors and books…)?

This year's judges are Professor Robert Dixon, Professor Morag Fraser AM, Lesley McKay, Regina Sutton and Murray Waldren.

The Miles Franklin Award honours the memory of Australian author Miles Franklin by awarding a prize for "the novel of the year which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases".

The shortlist will be announced on 16 April 2009.

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