Boy Books and Girl Books

I just finished reading E. L. Doctorow's The March, which is the first book slated to be discussed by Webster Groves Public Library's new book discussion group. I liked it very much. I also recently spoke with a woman who told me she 'tried to read it.' It was a war novel, it was for men, she lost interest. I think that's too bad. It is a novel set during a war, during an important period of that war; but it is also a novel about many people in varying relationships and how those relationships are affected by the war. Even though there are pretty lengthy descriptions of battle sequences (which I quite enjoyed), the battles are not the meat of the book.

In libraries, we know that men and women read different things. Women like Nora Roberts and Mary Higgins Clark. Men like Tom Clancy. Authors who attract equal numbers of men and women -- John Grisham springs to mind -- are few and far between.

But should this prejudice extend to award-winning books of true literary merit? War and Peace is a war novel, but nobody can claim to be well read who hasn't read it. The novels of Jane Austen are, at a certain level, romance novels, but they are so well written that again, one has to have read them to be versed in English literature.

Having said that, I realize that for all my reading, I gravitate to male authors more than women authors. I will read Philip Roth before Joyce Carol Oates, T. C. Boyle before Margaret Atwood, even though I realize all of them hold arguably equal literary value.

Do you have a preference (or prejudice) in your own choice of books to read? Do you think it shouldn't be so, or do you just not let it bother you?