Between the covers

What are the tomes which hold the key to womens' heart?

11 April 2012

Women's summer packing: bikini, suntan lotion, pile of fat novels. Men's packing: trunks, suntan lotion, iPod. The first day of the holiday we're stretched out on the sun-lounger, paperback in hand - be it an AS Byatt or the latest Lesley Pearce or, in Cherie Blair's case, an impressively hefty tome by fashionable historian Tristram Hunt.

We then try to ignore the fidgeting of our partner until he, blissfully, announces that he's off to find a windsurf board for hire.

But this sporty behaviour is no good for single men on the pull. Women don't want to see your half-naked muscles running with sweat, they want to see what you're reading.

After all, men who read more are better in bed - at least they are according to a summer NOP poll carried out for Penguin. And women find men who read far more attractive than illiterate sporting types.

But will the latest Robert Ludlum or Jeffrey Archer do the trick, or do you need to bend the covers of a Wuthering Heights or Anna Karenina?

"An English classic and I'd be half in love," says cool sophisticate and book critic Emily Robins, 35, "unless he was too old [should have read it years ago], or looked like a fogey with pretensions, in which case I wouldn't fall for it.

"But an athletic-looking bloke reading an obscure Jane Austen or Milton and my heart would be racing. Even more so if he was reading a French novel in French (I suppose in English would do), or something anguished like Conrad. "Reading a trendy modern novel [Brick Lane/White Teeth] would make me cautiously interested: is he at the cutting edge or just following the crowd?

"If he was reading Bernhard Schlink's The Reader or Niall Griffiths' Sheepshagger, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or, indeed, any Russian novel, I would be compelled to throw myself in his path."

THE survey says women read five times as many books as their partners, secretaries 10 times as many as their bosses, and - this is the really tragic NOP revelation - 83 per cent of men claim their preferred reading place is on the loo.

"I fell in love with a boy when we were 16 on a summer holiday, sitting on a boat in Portugal, because as we waited for our turns on the water-ski, says international fundraiser Jessica Ford. "He said: 'I wonder what's going on in my book' with the longing of someone who couldn't care less about the sun, girls and skiing."

"In fact, the book was only Colditz - I was rather disappointed.

"I also found myself falling in love very slowly, over a long period, with someone noble, gentle, quiet and stoic, and only realised that I truly adored him when we had a conversation in a pub during which he compared someone we both knew to a character in Jane Austen. Suddenly I knew we had the same frame of reference and, indeed, that he was the ideal Austen hero in the flesh."

Waterstones's suggested tomes for the "good-booking" man include A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, who committed suicide when he couldn't get published; satirical thrillers from Christopher Brookmyre; disreputable thrillers from Kyril Bonfigioli and The Man Who Fell In Love With His Wife, from "mature"-lit lad Paul Burke.

Penguin's list starts with Doing It by Melvin Burgess - complete with picture of woman taking her knickers off on the cover - which is sure to attract the thinking woman, and 31 Songs from Nick Hornby.

There is online-inspired serial killing, Want To Play? by PJ Tracy, "an On The Road for the 21st century"; You Shall Know Our Velocity by David Eggers and The Rotters Club, "a coming of age in Seventies' Birmingham" by Jonathan Coe. Doubtless they are all great boys' reads (and let's just skirt around the fact that there are no women authors on the lists) but, frankly, unless the woman is simply impressed that you have your nose inside a book at all, none of these are going to stop an intelligent chick in her tracks.

"Women don't demand that men enjoy the same books that they do in order to be attractive," says documentary maker Diana Withers. Indeed, a man reading chick-lit would have to prove he was a publisher to get away with it.

"I find men enjoying 'women's literature' hugely attractive - if it is genuine," says Withers. "I had a boyfriend who claimed to 'love' Margaret Atwood and all feminist writers and love to discuss her at parties. In fact, he wanted to out-perform the women in the room in terms of knowing more, and was just a a drunk male chauvinist pig. It was all a pretence."

MORE ABOUT

Jeffrey Archer

Literacy

Penguin

Between the covers

Read More