I like books. I read quite a lot of them and I have never been without a significant backlog of books to read since I was a teenager. Not everyone is like this though and there is nothing necessarily wrong with not being a reader. Most people in human history (including some truly great men), have not been able to read at all.
It also very much depends on what you read. Certain types of women are fond of reminding men that they consume a large chunk of the book market but they are far less fond of giving specifics. The specifics being a lot of romance, erotica pornography, self-help and general tosh. Men are better but not by a whole lot when it comes to popular genres and authors. Although I enjoy a lot of the historical fiction consumed by men, many books in this genre are the male equivalent of the romance novels that dominate so much of the female market.
So I do not consider it necessarily good or bad to read as it very much depends on what you read. I certainly believe that what I read is a lot higher-brow and respectable than the average reader and this is not simply a matter of taste. There are objectively bad and objectively good books. Most of the latter (particularly fiction), were published before the 1950s and I consider very little of what is published today to be worth publishing let alone reading. I expect the future will agree with me and a lot of these works will be lost to time and largely unlamented.
Now that this extended introduction is out of the way, I can get to the main purpose of the post which was originally inspired by a Twitter thread by Mencius Moldbugman (not the real Moldbug) which is posted below.
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