The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural form dominated almost entirely by women. In fact, reading fiction is often regarded as a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: "I don't read fiction, but my wife does." The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of the gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at that time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B.'s, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risque. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.
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amandla
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