Do Women Read More Fiction Than Men?

The Chronicle of Higher Ed, quoting from an article that appeared in In These Times, recently reported that women read fiction far more than men. More information regarding the results of surveys conducted in the UK, Canada, and the US can be found at the following link: In These Times .

As I mentioned in a previous post, I haven't been reading much fiction within the last few years. Currently, however, I am reading a new collection of stories by Thomas Fox Averill, a Kansas resident and a writer known to some of us in Kansas and the Great Plains. Entitled Ordinary Genius, this collection contains those stories written since Seeing Mona Naked (his last collection of stories), roughly a period of about fifteen years. I have been known to introduce my students to Averill's work, particularly "The Last Dancing Pig in Southeast Kansas," a story my students find funny and significant because Jacob's relationship with the pig parallel the male-female relationships in the story. I highly recommend this particular story and any one of Averill's collection of stories; his first one, and the one containing "The Last Dancing Pig in Southeast Kansas," is entitled Passes at the Moon.