If you’re stuck for gifts for the men in your life you might consider some E-Reads books that our surveys tells us are popular among males. Included are:

Sunday In Hell: Pearl Harbor Minute by Minute by Bill McWilliams
Using long established historical records and contemporary journals as well as recently-released war-time documents, Bill McWilliams has created a brand-new minute-by-minute narrative of the Day that Will Live in Infamy. Told from the point-of-view of dozens of characters from Generals and Admirals and politicians and diplomats down to deckhands and private soldiers and also innocent civilians at all levels, this panoramic overview of one of the most traumatizing and shocking events in American history puts the reader in a spot where they can understand the big picture of strategy and tactics as well as the intimate detail of what the chaos, violence and sudden death felt like to people immersed in the surprise of an armed attack on American soil.

The Great Siege by Ernle Bradford
Suleiman the Magnificent, the most powerful ruler in the world, was determined to conquer Europe. Only one thing stood in his way: a dot of an island in the Mediterranean called Malta, occupied by the Knights of St. John, the cream of the warriors of the Holy Roman Empire. A clash of civilizations was shaping up the likes of which had not been seen since Persia invaded Greece.

Determined to capture Malta and use its port to launch operations against Europe, Suleiman sent an armada and an overwhelming army. A few thousand defenders in Fort St. Elmo fought to the last man, enduring cruel hardships. When they captured the fort the Turks took no prisoners and mutilated the defenders’ bodies. Grand Master La Vallette of the Knights reciprocated by decapitating his Turkish prisoners and using their heads to cannonade the enemy. Then the battle for Malta began in earnest: no quarter asked; none given.

The Siege of Malta is not merely a gripping tale of brutality, courage, and tenacity, but the saga of two mighty civilizations struggling for domination of the known world.

The Blood We Shed by William Christie

The United States Marine Corps is a legendary fighting force. Literally thousands of books and movies have glorified its history. But now a Marine veteran has written a novel that opens up the curtain and provides a look deep inside the modern Corps: the good, the bad, and the sometimes just plain embarrassing.

Lieutenant Mike Galway takes command of his first platoon and it is not at all what he bargained for. What he anticipated was the challenge of training a unit of disciplined Marine infantrymen to go to war. Instead he finds himself responsible for a group of unruly American teenagers, for whom he has to become a combination of surrogate father, psychologist, high school principal, marriage counselor, financial advisor, conflict mediator, and drug and alcohol therapist. The results are frequently hilarious, always frustrating, and sometimes heartbreakingly tragic.

Maneater by Jack Warner
Most hunts end in a death. This hunt begins with one–Lanelle Jackson’s. A wild tiger has escaped its cargo truck and now roams the dense forests of the Appalachian Mountains. When deer and wild boar run out, the tiger turns its growing hunger towards man. Now it has a taste for easy prey. With a body-count on the rise and the media coming in, Sheriff Grady Brickhouse calls upon Jim Graham, a tiger hunter trained in India to end the man-eater’s killing spree.

In Maneater, author Jack Warner crafts a tightly suspenseful adventure novel, where death hides in the shadows of small town life. It will have you straining to hear the low growl of the wild before it’s too late…

Out of the Ashes by William C. Johnson
Ben Raines is searching for his family in the chaos that remains after devastation hits America. Thieves and gangsters take the streets in the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. Fearful American citizens band together searching for a leader. Luckily, there is Ben Raines, a rebel mercenary, soldier and patriot. Ben forges together the remains of the cities to join with the Resistance forces and create a new future for America. During their struggles, the final battle arises with an attack by government forces. Will they be able to rebuild America? And will Ben Raines find his family?
Out of the Ashes is the first novel of a gripping series that takes you further than you dare to imagine into a post-Apocalypse world

Meds by Ray Garton
One hot summer day, a man in a business suit running wildly down a busy street attacks a woman and her toddler, neither of whom have ever seen him before.

… As he waits in his pickup truck for his wife to finish shopping, a man decides to take the shotgun off its rack, go inside the mall and open fire on total strangers.

… While waiting to see her doctor, a woman takes a knife from her purse and begins stabbing others in the waiting room.

Something is making people become violent and murderous…something they all have in common. When Eli Dunbar discovers what it is, he becomes afraid, because it’s something he has in common with them–a drug prescribed to him by his psychiatrist. And now Eli is a ticking time bomb.

Do you know all of the risks your prescription drugs might pose? Does your doctor? Or has the manufacturer hidden them from the public in the interest of profits?

Meds…a thriller with deadly side effects.

A man’s will is the wind’s will, and the dreams of men are long, long dreams.

I humbly apologize to Longfellow for this presumptuous restatement of his great line (from My Lost Youth) but that’s what jumped into my head after reading Robert Lipsyte’s thought-provoking essay on the back page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Lipsyte attempts to “demystify…the testosterone code that would get teenage boys reading.” And the code is packed into the male’s need to be part of an us-against-them team. But that  condition is fraught with anxieties about hierarchy, performance, approbation, triumph and shame.

Both as agent and publisher I have devoted my career to understanding what boys and men like to read and introducing male readers to books they will enjoy. Unfortunately, hard statistical support for any thesis is meager and anecdotal. My own choices, whether representing a writer or publishing him (or her, for many women write wonderfully for men), are based more on instinct than on market surveys and are rooted in what I myself like to read.  And what I like to read as a man is what I loved to read as a boy – stirring fiction and nonfiction about gallant, righteous warriors conquering wicked scoundrels and overcoming daunting odds. And when I finish such a book I wonder whether I could adequately explain to a woman, without feeling a touch – or more – of embarrassment, what it is about it that spoke to me.

In publishing lingo the nickname for books for male readers is “boy books”, but believe it or not this is not a term of opprobrium; the editors I know and work with utter it with an indulgent smile, as they might talk about such boys-will-be-boys activities as beer blasts or belching contests or drag races. As I pointed out in an article called Chick Lit and Boy Books, these distinctions “arose in the 1980s as a large, capable and influential cadre of female editors took charge of the mass market paperback industry. Their attitudes were feminist and, after decades of second class citizenship in editorial management they wielded their influence on every category of popular fiction. ‘Chick lit’ was one of the terms coined at the time; ‘boy books’ another.”

And if you’re looking for someone to blame for gender stereotyping in the book business, you might as well blame BISAC. BISAC, an acronym for Book Industry Standards and Communications, is a Dewey Decimal-like system of codifying books by subject matter. As I explained in Chick Lit and Boy Books, “The titles you see on the spines of paperbacks are governed by types of literature and are so designated to help bookstores place their titles in the most effective way possible. General women’s fiction and romance tend to get stocked in a female oriented part of the store, whereas stuff like western fiction, military science fiction, and male action adventure go into the male part of the store.”

Now for the heart of Lipsyte’s article: he is worried that boys are becoming disinclined to read and the quantity and quality of books they like are dwindling. To understand why,I’m afraid there’s a touch of cherchez la femme in his analysis. “The current surge in children’s literature has been fueled by talented young female novelists fresh from M.F.A. programs who in earlier times would have been writing midlist adult fiction. Their novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers. It’s a cliché but mostly true that while teenage girls will read books about boys, teenage boys will rarely read books with predominately female characters.”

“Children’s literature didn’t always bear this overwhelmingly female imprint,”  says Lipsyte. But rather than paste his entire essay into this column, I urge you to read Boys and Reading: Is There Any Hope?. There you may rediscover the profound truth that Longfellow penned over a century ago:

A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the dreams of youth are long, long dreams.

Richard Curtis

Joanna Trollope, the distinguished novelist, has posted a blog on the guardian.co.uk home page complaining about the characterization of serious women’s literature as “chick lit”. She lays this derisive nomenclature at the feet of the male literary establishment.

“When I was an editor,” she writes, “my books written in the genre known for some reason as ‘commercial women’s fiction’. We – my colleagues and fellow publishers – loved these books and knew the truth, which is that books bought by women prop up the book trade, and that we should be proud both of the product itself and the diversion it gives hardworking people who want a good read. Now I’ve left, I’m looking at it from the other side – and what I see alarms me.”

“Books – both fiction and non-fiction – reflecting women’s lives, whether young or old, are labelled. Hence ‘chick-lit’: often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women drinking chardonnay and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance.”

Ms, Trollope, you have every reason to be offended. But I wonder if you would deflect your ill will if you knew that commercial men’s literature suffers the same treatment by the female staffs of many publishing houses. Science fiction, action adventure, thrillers, and biography and history appealing to male tastes are characterized as “boy books.”

This term arose in the 1980s as a large, capable and influential cadre of female editors took charge of the mass market paperback industry. Their attitudes were feminist and, after decades of second class citizenship in editorial management they wielded their influence on every category of popular fiction. “Chick lit” was one of the terms coined at the time; “boy books” another. But they were not really terms of opprobrium. The editors I know and work with daily are quite good humored and comfortable with these terms.

Another reason for what appears to be dismissive categorization of popular literature is the BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) system of codifying books by subject matter. The titles you see on the spines of paperbacks are governed by types of literature and are so designated to help bookstores place their titles in the most effective way possible. General women’s fiction and romance tend to get stocked in a female oriented part of the store, whereas stuff like western fiction, military science fiction, and male action adventure go into the male part of the store.

So, I have to differ with you: it’s not the male conspiracy that you say it is. It’s just an age-old fact of life: Vive la difference.

Read Don’t patronise popular fiction by women posted by Harriet Evans

Richard Curtis