NOVEL READING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18532, 17 October 1923, Page 14

NOVEL READING.

" Get into the country; walk, eat, and read novels." :;• ': ' ".' ?'fT '•'■■■ '"■■ . *" -" This'was the prescription given a little while ago to an over-worked business man who consulted his doctor, says a writer in an exchange. ! / The patient replied that he could not undertake to follow the last detail of the treatment-. ' , ' ••'I can't read novels/' he complained. '' Biographies, histories, if you like; but novels bore me." The doctor insisted. . ■ .'">'■ You are suffering from overwork. You must get away from facts. Your imagination needs stirring. Bo as I tell you and'l promise tuat you will benefit." .The man obeyed, and some weeks afterwards he thanked his doctor. ;,.''You were right," ho said.' "1 needed a mental rest and I got it by reading fiction."

. Men need subtly to be encouraged to read more fiction.

'hv l stopped reading fiction when Kipling stopped writing it," a man said to me a day or two ago. Kipling, essentially a man's writer, has no r successor,; Most of the men who are Writing fiction to-day are writing for a feminine public. This is flattering to .women, but there are many women who like to read books which appeal to men. livery " schoolgirl likes stories of boys' schools, and every woman likes sometimes to* get away from the novel of marriage or love, which deals ' almost exclusively with the woman's point of view, to the novel written by a man for men. ' . Jrien do not read modern novels because they are not deeply interested in analyses of the relationship between the sexes. Such books usually bore them. Stories of .great endeavour, of adventure, of high romance, or of very unsentimental but unforced simplicity, men like. ' But who is writing them- to-day? Is it possible that in five and .twenty years' time fiction will be written for women, about women, by women "" The age needs another Kipling. '