The Weekly Whims Of HatManJim: I’ve Just Realised That I Seem To Have Stopped Reading Men

A weather-beaten eye cast over the media: HatManJim looks at a story in the headlines and as a feminist with a penis (Menimist? Femi-meni-mist? I just believe i n women’s rights, I’m not having gender-reassignment. OK?), attempts to map the sexism inherent in the press, without inadvertently saying anything lecherous about breasts.

I have no literary taste whatsoever and apparently pay no attention to what is occurring in the world of fiction writing. In fact, I am practically illiterate.

It wasn’t always this way. As a child I was rarely found without a book in my hand. This may have explained why I had so few friends. As the years passed and I became a man I gained a mediocre degree in English Literature from a vaguely respectable university.

When I think back to those happy times and the books I liked reading, they were written, for the most part, by men. Don’t get me wrong. I greatly enjoyed Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Angela Carter. But they were never my favourites. It was always Hemingway and Orwell and in modern times Irvine Welsh and Iain Banks (I said I have no literary taste already).

I eventually decided I’d stop beating myself up about this. I enjoyed books predominantly written by white, middle-class male writers because I was in a similar mindset to them. I could appreciate books by other people but they did not connect with me to the same extent.

Whatever happened to my page devouring ways you ask? I’m not entirely sure. It just seems like there’s hardly ever enough time to lose myself in a book.

But it is only now that the full extent of my disconnection with the literary becomes apparent to me. This occurred when reading about Publisher Weekly’s Top 10 books of 2009 article and the ensuing fuss that everyone on the list was a male, as reported by The Guardian here.

I’m baffled by the PW list – not only because it seems to have wilfully excluded some great female writers – but because I haven’t heard of one bloody person on there. Victor LaValle? Who is he? David Grann? Never registered on my radar. I am apparently so out of touch that the great and the good of the written word, the male great and good at least, are completely over my head.

If they had, as The Guardian suggested, included AS Byatt, Audrey Niffenegger and Margaret Atwood, then you’d be talking my language. And where exactly is Katie Price? It seems that it is only the male end of the pen that has ceased to hold my attention. Ahem.

HatManJim’s column will appear every Saturday.