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Sunday, April 09, 2006
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UD has known for some time… …that she is a man. Anatomically female, to be sure; and happily married to a man. But for all that, a man. She says this not to be provocative or weird but rather to help explain why she finds annoying a remark that a professor, who studied which novels men love and which women love, recently made about men’s choices. See, the women go for romance and happy endings -- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre -- and they’re also apparently always thumbing through this same stuff year after year for consolation, blah blah. Whereas the men, who tend to read one book, enjoy it, and then look for another, like what UD likes -- novels of ideas, philosophical and political: Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, 1984. They also go for books written from a rather dry detached, "dark" point of view: Lolita and Catch 22 and Brighton Rock. One man mentions that his favorite book isn’t fiction but rather Robert Graves’s World War One memoir, Goodbye to All That, which happens to be one of UD’s all-time favorites too -- and it’s got the same dry unsentimental thing that most of the other man-novels have going. So here’s the professor’s conclusion: "The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading.” Puberty reading! Unlike obsessive attraction to stories of females bagging rich bounty! How unevolved of men to find spiritual extremity and social cataclysm rather than love and marriage riveting! --- via ralph, cliopatria --- |