November ‘22 Recap

This episode of Books for Men is a short recap of all the books and authors we covered in November '22. It also shares a little more about why I do the podcast. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So this is a recap episode, and I'm going to try my best to keep it short and brief. I know many of these episodes are listened to by new listeners, which is great, so I want to give them a little taste of what this show is actually about. So I apologize to all my consistent listeners if I sound like a broken record, but the main goal of this show is exactly how I lead every show off to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. Quite simply fewer men are reading than ever before, and although you might be asking yourself, well, how do you know that? How could you say that? All you have to do is get around a group of men and ask the simple question, what are you reading right now?

(01:01)

If you get more than one out of 10 to answer the question I am reading such and such, then I would consider that a success because I can get around a group of 10 males and ask that question, and very easily, all 10 of them could say, I don't read at all, or I'm not reading anything. And it's not that far-fetched. Men are doing other things with their time. It's not the primary form of entertainment anymore as it once was for many, many years, right? There's been advancements in television and movies and technology and cell phones and video games and all this stuff, and what's happened, reading has fallen by the wayside as culture has sped up. All of the slow contemplative activities have taken a backseat, so you could point to just logical, rational reasoning by polling the men around you, and you'll be able to see that.

(01:59)

With that being said, I'm not here to condemn men for not reading. I'm here to inspire them to read more. And how am I doing that? I am featuring books that I think any male reader would enjoy reading. Now, you might say, well, how would you know that? Well, I'm a man, and so I enjoy reading it, so why wouldn't they enjoy reading it? I'm not trying to recreate the wheel, and I don't want there to be a misconception either about the show in that it's exclusionary for females or anything of that nature, because that is the farthest thing from what I am attempting to do and trying to do with this show. In fact, the reason why I feature a lot of female authors on this show is that I enjoy female authors, and I think that men would enjoy female authors as well.

(02:49)

And I also will say the biggest benefit of reading a wide range of voices is that you're able to step inside the shoes of another individual, hopefully, see the world through their perspective in a way, or most importantly, I should say, that builds empathy, that builds understanding, and that's why I'm a huge advocate for reading a variety of voices and why this show will always try to feature a variety within my interests. Of course, the other thing to just show you that men are reading a lot less is if you look at publishing industry data, it's very, very clear. Women are significantly outpacing men in reading numbers overall, especially in the fiction world, the fiction world, women readers to men readers is pretty alarming. I mean, it dwarfs the number of male readers that there are. It's a very, very big difference, and I think personally, there's a lot of factors that contribute to that.

(03:52)

Some of them are cultural, some of them industry related, but I'm not necessarily here to look at what should be. I'm here to look at what is and hopefully provide a solution for men who read already to get introduced to new books or to inspire new male readers, which would be an amazing, amazing thing. Why? Pretty much for the reason that I had mentioned earlier, empathy, and understanding, it just builds a more well-rounded society. Now, I will say that in the non-fiction world, there is still a large cohort of male readership. The wider gap is definitely in the fiction realm. Now, if this show had other intentions, maybe all I would do is feature non-fiction books, right? That would probably gather more listeners because men read non-fiction more. But one of the big things that I hope to do with the show over time is introduce men into fiction.

(04:53)

If they're not already there, I would love to help create some kind of blend in your reading so that way you can get the benefits of reading fiction, because there are a number of them compared to reading in the non-fiction category. It builds a different set of skills that you just can't get from reading solely non-fiction, and you definitely can't get those skills from watching a movie or a television show because everything is spelled out for you in a visual context. You're not using your mind to imagine, and that makes all the difference in the world. One of my favorite quotes is from David Geffen, and he says, “I've always thought that each person invented himself for whatever reasons, through whatever circumstances, through whatever he has gone through, that we are each a figment of our own imagination, and some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.”

(05:47)

When I heard that the first time, I was so taken aback by it and I thought to myself, man, it's so true. Everything around us is a story. Everything around us is created. I knew that, but why is it that some people can imagine much bigger things or many different realities than other people can? And personally, I think that's where that imagination atrophy comes in, right? We're not using our imagination, we're not using our brains in that way. We're forfeiting our ability to think critically and imagine things in our mind for stuff that is spelled out for us, for super clear, for things that happen fast and quickly. And I think personally that has a negative effect on one's life over time. And when you talk about that in large numbers call it society, and you look at the decline of say, male readership, then you're talking about the potential impact being on a much larger scale.

(06:52)

Now, I get it. There are other ways that you could do this, and I don't want to be too extreme about this, but you could sense that I'm a little passionate about the subject and I don't want to go on any longer. I haven't even shared the recap. This is a recap episode, so let me start to wrap this up here. And this was a good month of Books for Men. We featured two fiction books, like always, and two non-fiction books. The two fiction books were Queenpin and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Both of them are classic noir. One of them The Postman Always Rings Twice, was really the springboard for the entire genre back in 1934. It was authored by James M. Cain and he kind of, along with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett really put that genre in the forefront for the next, call it 20 years or so.

(07:43)

It was a primary genre in American literature. Then in 2007 or a little before that, Megan Abbott tried to sort of revive it, and she emulated it with a series of books, my favorite being Queenpin, which is a novel about a young woman learning the ropes from this mob luminary, this older woman. She's like a hustler, and you know what happens as she meets the wrong man and yada, yada yada. Both of those stories are very, very simple, and that's where the power is in the stories themselves. They're also written in what would be considered a hard-boiled type of writing, which is very edgy and unbridled. It features a lot of sexuality and violence, but if you want more on classic noir or noir fiction or either of those two books, I would just go back and listen to the episodes, cause I talk a lot about that.

(08:31)

Also, this month, we featured two great non-fiction books. The first one is a book that I've recommended more times than any other book in my entire life, and it's called The Dip by Seth Godin. There's probably not been a more influential thinker in my life, at least early Doug than Seth Godin was. So I have nothing but fond opinions about Seth, and I also had the pleasure of interviewing him on this podcast back when it was called, It's Not What It Seems. You can go back into the archives and listen to it. That's something actually I'm looking to do, moving it to next year, is maybe republish some of those interviews from that time period along with bringing on new interviews. But that's just a small taste. Anyway, The Dip is a book about teaching you when to quit in your life and why you should quit the stuff in your life, and more importantly, when you should probably stick with something. It's really, really fundamental. It's foundational. I think it's so important, and I really, really think that you should read it, but go back, listen to that episode.

(09:23)

The other non-fiction book that I featured in November was Man's Search for Meaning, a powerful powerful book. I think it’s had 16 million copies sold of it or 16 million copies in circulation. It's impacted a lot of people. It's about an Austrian psychiatrist's experience surviving Nazi death camps as well as his psychotherapeutic approach to living a meaningful life. So it really tackles a big, chunky, meaty subject in one's life, but it's not something that you should shy away from because I think it would be very empowering and very inspirational for you. All right, so this episode is now a wrap. I'm sorry, I know I said I would keep it short, and I went on a lot longer than I thought I would.

(10:16)

Sometimes I go on rants and I did that earlier, but at least you'll have a clear understanding of why I do this show, and perhaps that is the most important thing. If you do enjoy it, please remember to share it with family members, friends, coworkers, colleagues, or anyone who you think might enjoy it, and if you want to double down on that support, then please remember to rate it, review it, all that good stuff on any of the podcast providers that you listen to this on. The whole point of the show is to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do, and the more that you can support the podcast, the louder that message will get. Lastly, if you'd like more information, please remember, you could go to books for men.org or you can also sign up for the monthly newsletter. It's just a roundup of all the books and authors that you hear on the show, as well as a new edition that I have where I recommend another two or three books that I've read throughout the previous month. So it's almost like real-time recommendations, things that I have read over the course of November that I think you might enjoy. Not everything I've read over the course of November, just two or three things that I think you might really enjoy. And again, you could get that by signing up at BooksforMen.org.