Who’s Reading Hatchet?

An article in The Atlantic posits that the reason boys aren’t reading is that new young adult books with female protagonists outnumber new books with male protagonists two to one, and, in some genres, three to one. New books that cater to male interests are in short supply.

This large discrepancy — a recent development — can’t be explained only by an economic incentive for the publishing industry to cater to girls, who are “just better readers,” and therefore more reliable customers. That the industry is overwhelmingly female, additionally, suggests an ideological predilection in the literary world that selects against maleness. Female preferences influence not only which books are offered to readers in libraries and bookstores but even which books are published, seemingly with an ethos of left-wing retribution against privilege, toxic masculinity, and the gender binary.