What happened to the adventure books for boys and men that used to be so prevalent once upon a time? Did they get replaced by other media? Pushed out by female domination? Dropped by big companies for all the typical political reasons?
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They seemed to be phased out as video games became more complex.
Books are replaced by games?
I’m a reasonably avid reader and it seems to me that publishing was the first industry to become fully captured by that femininity-made-religion that the ongoing Woke movement essentially is. Like, it’s been dominated by women and the specific female-lefty worldview that now runs everything since about 2000 or so, in my estimation — long before the movement took over all society more generally. Companies just don’t tend to put out “male” or “male-oriented” books that much anymore, unless the author was already established before the takeover. There’s nothing stopping dudes from writing the books they to see published, there’s just a much harder road to getting into covers and getting recognized to the point where the average bookstore will order them.
I'll throw out the devil's advocate here and say that publishing became female oriented because that's literally the largest market for it. Once technology advanced enough to give women free time, reading became one of their biggest pastimes and it hasn't left since. Whereas most men who were ever into reading grew out of it as they aged as they instead went on actual adventures instead.
Its basic capitalism, and also why the "young adult" genre, AKA the only time boys and girls intersect as a market, is the most popular by a long shot.
Publishing companies have been somewhat dominated by women for decades, but it only became more absolute in the last 20 years. Worse still, they're probably rife with danger hair millennials who became utterly warped and deranged after all the communist-feminist grooming in university.
Longer than that. So publishing for the most part is rather low paying. It mostly attracted women that wanted jobs but didn't need jobs. You come from an upper class background and/or have a high earning husband then it makes it ok to take a job that on its face seems glamorous but pays terribly because you literally don't need the money.
Basically the YA market for teenage boys no longer exists. You will not find a book with a male protagonist older than 12. At that point they either stop reading or jump to adult books.
Most YA is all female dominated. A large portion of this is because the average reader of YA is women in their 30s and 40s. The same crowd that reads romance novels reads YA.
I work in a book store. It's all pride shit these days or aimed at girls.
Boys get Diary of a wimpy kid and the Treehouse Guys, short on text and heavily broken up by illustrations to accommodate their ADHD and keep the focus.
Hardy boys and other adventure books are more or less dead.
If I were to guess, they weren't as ADHD inducing as electronic media is so harder to keep the attention of kids programmed by society to have short attention spans compared to short videos and video games.
I'm not knocking video games but it's true, it wouldn't surprise me if without some course correction, games like Skyrim die off in the future because there are times without any action to keep you distracted constantly. They'd prefer the younger generations (and all if they could) to have a short memory and attention as easier to screw them over.
I was thinking the same thing the other day. Would be perfect for boys now
Smith: you seem to be tapped in with a lot of different people because of your involvement with your Church. do boys actually read these days? I'm about 10 years older than you, and in my day everybody read at least a little bit -- there wasn't anything else to do!!! 30 minutes before sleeping everybody would read a little bit. Now with the plethora of other activities... I find it hard to believe that people still read.
Aerotrain
Yeah boys don't read much anymore. If you look at Japanese light novels and manga that's basically all they are. Isekai, adventure, etc. So there's definitely demand, but I doubt any publisher would want to put out something like that from a western author.
I remember having stuff like Eragon, would even count Harry Potter amongst that even. We did have some with female protagonists, also but nowadays it's all the faggy shit.
Still enjoy the genre and you have a better chance reading Web novels, translated light novel or older stuff. I do not like the trend of phasing young boys out entirely, there's just nothing for them to read anymore that's modern, older can be harder to find occasionally. Classics are easy to get at least, if you use an ereader that's even easier.
Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Matthew Reilly. First that came to mind. You’re welcome.
They’re not quite “boy’s own adventure”, but they’re as close as we’re gonna get.
For YA novels, best bet is probably Anthony Horowitz. He’s still around, and writing stuff.
There’s plenty of these books still out there, but, as those “big name” authors have died off, I haven’t seen new releases quite as frequently, I must admit…
Okay, but those first two are ancient.
Is Matthew Reilly worth reading. I've read enough of your posts that I think we'd have similar tastes.
Aerotrain
There are some good books, but my kids read a lot of older stuff.
The "Who Was..." book series is pretty good.
I have a ton of recommendations of books for boy children.
Choose Your Own Adventure was the closest I ever got to enjoying horror.
Seriously, those books were MESSED UP at times!
Laughs in Goosebumps...
I still have an irrational fear of ventriloquist's dolls partly as a result. Ick...
But I bloody (ha) loved those books for a few years! Weird kid as I was, lol...
Yes, but you EXPECT horror from Goosebumps.
I'm trying to think of examples, are you talking about things like Moby Dick, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and such I assume? I read an absolute ton as a kid 30 years ago and while I read a lot of that stuff, I can't think of much like that I read that even came out in my own era. Some Star Wars books maybe, does that count?
My oldest nephew reads quite a bit. I'm not sure what we will read when he moves out of like elementary school age books. Manga wouldn't surprise me. I can't see him reading old adventure stuff. I can also say if he was allowed to use his iPad whenever he wanted he'd never leave it alone and never read anything that wasn't on it's screen. So take away the parental control and he wouldn't read a thing, and to me it looks like parents being parents is not all that common anymore.
Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy (to a lesser extent) would very much count…
And anyone similar to that, as unfortunately both of those two are dead, and haven’t really been followed by anyone of quite the same “standard”, at least, as yet…
Clive Cussler is great, though. His son sometimes wrote part of each of his novels - he must still be around.
Oh, and Matthew Reilly, but I wouldn’t consider him to be quite on the same “level”. But he’s good, too.
I'm actually writing one now - It will be as anti-woke as possible. Will obviously have to self publish because of that
Three things killed adventure.
First, American education became hostile to their main demographic (young boys). Less demand for boy's lit (think back to your elementary school librarian, how much of a bitch was she?) meant less books published in the genre.
Adventure/wonder was killed off in the 1930s, and most of the Western examples (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc.) are refugees from that era, or are deliberate throwbacks to that era. R. L. Stine is just a 1930s creepy story in short book form.
The rise of the vidya. 1 + 2 meant that young boys wanted an adventure fix, and Japan gave it to them.