I don't get how the act of reading books needs to be a male or female thing. There are a lot more books that are drama or love based, and those seem to be the most popular books for the ladies. There are plenty of sci-fi, technical/technological, and action books that combine aspects of good drama and make for amazing books for anyone to read, more commonly males though.
I haven't read a book in awhile, but I do enjoy a good read. If you're into photography, as I am but don't really pursue it much, I imagine you have a creative mind, possibly visually oriented. Fiction books are a great read for people like us. We can really get into a good story.
The books I have enjoyed reading are Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, a lengthy but damn fun read. Michael Crichton was a favorite of mine as well, enjoyed his novels Sphere, Prey, and State of Fear. And of course he had the Jurassic Park and Lost World novels, as well as Congo and a multitude of more crime-thriller oriented books. He had penned quite a few novels that covered quite a bit of different styles, his later years became far more technologically-oriented it seemed, and many weren't a big fan of his late work compared to his early work. I haven't gotten into reading his older work, one day I will. State of Fear was a good read, though he was always very critical of Global Climate Change and didn't believe it was real, and that permeated throughout State of Fear. If you can ignore his heavy bias (used a lot of research and real graphs, though data can be found that leans in either direction, he chose to only use the material that was biased against GCC/global warming). But it was a very fun read, and was very engrossing imho.
Through the style Crichton used, he always heavily researched his subject matter before working on the fiction, so his work is very easy to digest for anyone who isn't a huge fan of fiction but enjoys technical material. And Rainbow Six is just a damn fun read for anyone interested in military stuff.