WHAT WOMEN READ.

Waikato Times, Volume 100, Issue 16780, 24 April 1926, Page 15 (Supplement)

WHAT WOMEN READ.

FICTION PLAYS A LARGE PART. < DIVERSITY OK TASTE. What do women read? Having found an immense diversity of taste among my own friends, who range from lovers of "sheik" fiction lo students of labour reports, i began to inquire at leading lending libraries (writes Mrs Stanley Wrench in an English exchange). According lo most librarians, women waul, above all else light fiction. Memoirs and anonymous books of anecdotes concerning high-placed personages conic a good second. "You've only to have a novel with. 'Love' in ils title and it is constantly in demand," one librarian told me. "Novel-reading women go by Hie titles."

At several big bookshops I was told llial, although fiction certainly plays a pari, the tastes of women are changing and that much more serious literature is read Ihan before the war. Uookbuyhig women select works dealing Willi philosophy, travel, and criticism, While verse and belles-lettres, at one time purchased for presents, are now

bought by women for their own enjoyment.. Few Women Buy IMoveis. ■ "Few women buy novels." said a well-known bookseller. "They borrow them. Then, if the book is worth while, they buy it. Men buy novels to give lo won , but if n woman conies in to buy a novel she has usually read if beforehand and likes it well enough to possess it." Which certainly suggests' prudence on the part of women, but means less bread and butter for novelists. However, I was fold that fiction-reading has been steadily on the increase among men since the war. "Men got the taste for novels then just as women got the taste for cockfails," drily remarked the manager of a great bool* store. "You will still find women reading fiction, but most of them never buy books of any kind." And the woman of the futureV

Al home we were packing for a month's travel abroad, and I was deliberating what' hooks I dare make room for, when my nine-years-old daughter brought me two volumes. "Try lo squeeze them hi somewhere, mummy," she said.

, I looked at Ihem. Kipling's ".lust So Stories," and a much-worn ropy of Lli o "Iliad," and smiled. Willi Ihe woman of the future Action will be safe.