Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Dude Lit?

I'm reading Glamorous Disasters, and am a bit mystified. Who is the intended audience for this book? It reads exactly as if someone gave The Nanny Diaries to some hack and said "Turn the girl in this story into a guy." Accordingly there's a little more no-strings sex and vigorous exercise but basically the story arc is the same. Are there a lot of young men who want to read books like this? My sense is that the straight young men who are reading, are reading things like Tom Clancy or whoever is the current Tom Clancy, along with manly non-fiction such as "Guns, Germs and Steel."

I realize that this may reflect some deep-seated sexism on my part, just as I know it should not make me uncomfortable to hear Michael Bolton sing "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?"

But there you go.

OTOH, Elliot Shrefer had a hard act to follow, because I just finished reading Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, with an epigrammatic gem on nearly every page. My favorite: "Every family has a secret, and the secret is that it is not like other families."

No comments: