Could reading more help men feel less alone? 'The Boys in the Boat' author Daniel James Brown thinks so

Men are, apparently, reading less, at least according to a plethora of headlines over the past few months and years.

A September piece in Vulture began with this sardonic line: "Whither the men? Not in your local bookstore, that’s for sure." A New York Times headline in June asked, "Why did the novel-reading man disappear?" And The Atlantic asserted, "Literature is often pushed on allegedly reluctant men as a machine for empathy."

Several frequently cited statistics are a few years old now, with one of the most frequently referenced stats coming from a Pew Research Study in 2021 that found 73% of men said they read a book in the past year, compared to 78% of women. The question of whether men are reading generally also has been conflated with whether men are reading fiction, specifically. Despite the questionable nature of this literary crisis, it's enough of a thing to have writers, publishers, and various pontificators wringing their hands over how to get men reading again.

So, let us pontificate.

"I do remember what it's like to be a young man, barely, and it's easy to feel alienated and alone in the world," said author Daniel James Brown; he's 74. "I do think that books that speak to men doing things with other men, men having an interesting relationship with other men, there's a need for more of that."

Brown is uniquely credentialed to have an opinion on what men might want to read more of. He's the author of "The Boys in the Boat," which has sold well over a million copies since it was published in 2013 and was adapted into a movie in 2023. The story of nine working-class young men rowing their way to the 1936 Olympics resonated with all sorts of readers, but it seemed to deeply affect men in particular. Brown received emails from men who said the book made them cry. He heard from some men's wives, saying it was the first book their husbands had read in more than a decade.

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Brown, who has written three more narrative nonfiction books in addition to "The Boys in the Boat," said he's been trying to figure what it was that moved men so much since.

"I think it revolves around a kind of loneliness that men often have, and a kind of feeling of alienation and a hankering for what happened in that book, which is basically a bunch of guys getting to know each other and coming together and starting to love each other," Brown said.

That male-bonding, showing men today how this generation of hard-scrabble guys, athletes in fact, needed each other to do an incredible thing.

"Books that explore the human psyche, whether they're fiction or narrative nonfiction or history or biography, all those do the same thing," he said. "Each time you read a book, you increase the scope of your understanding of the world and your place in it. And part of that for young men is the place of masculinity and what masculinity has meant in past cultures and past times and what it means now."

The young men in "The Boys in the Boat" are undoubtedly masculine. They're pushing their bodies to the brink of failure, working physically demanding jobs outside of school, supporting friends and family, and, eventually, standing up against Nazis. They're also whole beings, even wholesome. Brown told the story of their physical feats, yes, but devoted as much time to their emotional and social accomplishments.

Readers were given an especially holistic look at the life of Brown's lead character, Joe Rantz, who faced abandonment, poverty, and an uncertainty about his place on a university campus.

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"I thought it was important to talk about the vulnerabilities that Joe felt, because I felt many of those same vulnerabilities," Brown said. "I was a very anxious young man. I was bullied. I had a really difficult time as an adolescent, pre-adolescent, not of the same sort that Joe Rance had in the book. But still, I know what it's like to feel broken."

Brown intentionally set out to show readers "what heals a young man" and takes them to a better place.

While "The Boys in the Boat" may be his most famous work, Brown's other books also capture men not as tropes but as whole people.

His 2009 book "The Indifferent Stars Above" is a painstakingly researched account of the wagon train known as the Donner Party that met with tragedy on its journey west from Illinois in the 1840s. The party's story was sensationalized when it occurred because of how members, desperate and starving, ate some of their dead.

Brown's retelling is far more concerned with the efforts the party made to protect one another, the relationships they had, and the strength they found together. More men than women of the Donner Party died in the journey because, as Brown explained, they burned massive amounts of calories performing traditionally male tasks that were physically demanding; there were physiological reasons, too, but being responsible for chopping firewood while starving certainly didn't help.

"I don't have a lot of tolerance for the kinds of things that we now call toxic masculinity," Brown said. "For instance, I was big fan of Hemingway when I was a young man, and as I've gotten older, I've become less and less a fan. I mean, it's still brilliant, absolutely brilliant writer, and can be appreciated on a lot of levels. But that sort of toxic machismo thing that Hemingway had going on, I no longer have any tolerance for it."

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Instead, Brown recommended the work of Seattle author Timothy Egan and books like Hampton Sides' "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook" and Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption."

"I look to past generations sometimes when I'm trying to think about what a man is and can be in the world," he said. "What should a man be in the world? I draw a lot from past generations now that I'm an older man. To be honest, I don't know if that works for a 30-something-year-old man, but that's how I'm working on it."