What Are Folks Reading Today?

Sun., Aug. 24, 1997

Larry Swindell Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Talking with librarians is for me an enjoyable pastime, fascinating in its informativeness. The most committed readers are library users, and I like to know what they read nowadays. I pester librarians in large cities and small towns to learn what is being checked out.

For almost any library, women outnumber men as card carriers, yet men read more nonfiction. Women by an astounding ratio (better than 4-to-1) check out more fiction titles. Their preference is for women writers, and for more than a decade Danielle Steel has been the author most in demand.

In more-or-less “classic” American fiction, Willa Cather easily outdistances Edith Wharton as author of choice, but Wharton is far ahead of the rest of the pack. Ellen Glasgow once rated as a triumvirate figure with Edith and Willa, but there’s no run on Glasgow titles in today’s libraries.

More instructive, for me, are the present inclinations of women readers toward male authors. They gobble up Stephen King but leave Tom Clancy and the technothriller crowd to their husbands and sons and gentleman callers. Women also are more easily drawn toward really old fiction - Dickens, the sisters Bronte, George Eliot; and while they ignore Walter Scott, they still read “the American Scott” who was James Fenimore Cooper. Mark Twain, yes; Henry James, no.

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