What’s Your Favorite Novel?

From Reason, a “recent survey of men’s and women’s favorite books points to a more fundamental question—and a fascinating answer.” An excerpt:

When they got around to interviewing men on the same topic, the results were decidedly different. For starters, many male respondents took issue with the question itself, either refusing to name a text or picking a non-fiction work instead of a novel. “Many men we approached really did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices,” wrote Jardine and Watkins. The men’s responses also didn’t vary as much as the women’s. The women they interviewed coughed up about 200 different titles, whereas the men’s picks congregated mostly around four works: Albert Camus’s The Stranger (traditionally translated into British English as The Outsider), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

“The men’s list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading,” Jardine cheekily told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We found that men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life’s journey, as consolers or guides, as women do… They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals.”