Weird article in The Daily Beast by a writer called Frank Bill. Idea is that men are not manly enough these days, so there are fewer manly novels about manly things.
What I don’t know is what he means by “masculine writing”. Does he mean subject matter–wars and hunting? There are books about those things. Or choice of words–short, blunt sentences? Like Hemingway, who did both.
Tough to gut it out through lots of words. Have to fight your way through dense jungles of adjectives and adverbs, hunt down the meaning. Cut out useless bits. More manly to use short sentences, or fragments. But that has drawbacks, too. Can be hard to follow the logic.
Probably, fewer men read than women. So topics are chosen accordingly. It’s tough, but you have to man up, grit your teeth, and realize that probably, they’ve already won the war for dominance of the bookshelves.