Aspects of a NYT Article on Book Clubs For Men Only

The New York Times  has an article about book clubs for men only, which you can read in full by clicking on the hyperlink under those words.

I'm not going to address the ins and outs of that notion, which seems reasonable enough, but rather quickly mention two topics contained within the article because they relate to earlier posts on this blog.

The first club mentioned in the article is located in Marin, California, and it has what was described as a cardinal rule:  no books by women about women. While the members of the club were apparently thinking mostly of "chic lit" as something they aren't interested in reading, when it comes to popular fiction in general, they don't have too much to worry about. See my earlier post entitled "Male Characters Dominate Fiction."


Further down, the NYT article talks about a book club for gay men in New York and notes that "Giovanni"s Room" by James Baldwin is one of the books that has been especially popular there.

I recently covered, in a series of posts that you can find here, here, here and here, a competition organized by Literary Hub to determine the best of "literary sex writing."  The winner was a passage from "Giovanni's Room," which I found very interesting.

The reason: that passage was the only one of the original 16 competing excerpts that didn't depict sex at all, either explicitly or by means of a writerly metaphor.  Perhaps the Times article on book clubs for men helps explain why Baldwin's book was included in the competition at all.

For the record, I welcomed the outcome of the competition because my novella, "Manhattan Morning," does not have any explicit sex in it either, much to the distress of one reader in particular. That's not to say, however, that sex isn't part of the story. It is an important part.