Author Mentoring

The Guardian has an excellent piece on the differences (gasp!) between male and female fiction reading habits. The authors are grudgingly forced to admit that men and women seem to look at fiction differently, with women using novels as emotional guides that often provide epiphanies and men (who, on the whole, read far less fiction) looking at books in a more concrete fashion, often focusing on loneliness and intellectual struggle. It also includes a mention of the concept of author “mentoring:”

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I’ve never heard it referred to as “mentoring” before, but this hits pretty close to my experience. Starting around when I was eight or nine, I tended to dwell on certain authors—Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, a few others—to the total exclusion of all others. I enjoyed their prose, found intellectual kinship in their ideas, and wanted to stick to material that felt close to my own experience. I still do this, even in the realm of non-fiction; I have my mental list of “trusted authors” whom I read regularly and tend to look toward for insight on certain issues. I do take word-of-mouth recommendations seriously, though, again, only from those for whom I have some intellectual respect. It seems to me that this is the obvious way to make sure that what little time one has for reading is spent wisely. There are dozens of books released every month; I can only read a few. No publication is consistently accurate enough to predict what will be worthwhile and what won’t, but there are some individual voices whose knowledge, intellect, and experience I respect. Taken in aggregate, those voices can and do provide a pretty good guide.

Addendum: I should note that an extremely intelligent, literate female friend—one of my trusted sources—claims that the article gets Jane Eyre wrong. She tells me that the book’s core message is that character, not love, triumphs over all. Having not read the book since I was probably 15 (and even then, to say that I actually read it probably would’ve been a stretch), I can’t say one way or the other, but I trust her views on this sort of thing implicitly.