Tough Guy Book Club reaches 10,000 members in 10 countries

By Tom Whitfield

Tough Guy Book Club reports 10,000 members across 10 countries after 14 years, with local chapters meeting at 7pm on the first Wednesday of every month.

Membership establishes scale, not impact. No literacy, reading-frequency or retention data accompanies the figure.

Over a pint of Melbourne Black in his local Brunswick pub, founder Shay Leighton asked: “When did we decide that men and reading and toughness all had to be separate things?” He added: “I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get a vote.”

Leighton describes the not-for-profit charity as more than a reading group. “We’re not a reading club, we’re a talking club,” he says. Its three goals are:

• Read more
• Talk more
• Have more friends

In 2012, Leighton said, “I’d made some pretty bad choices and I was really unhappy. My partner had just left, my business had closed down and I didn’t have any friends.” A book club was his way “to get me out of the house cause I had pretty much fucked my life up”.

The club began with Leighton and his mate Tom Scott, discussing Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in the beer garden of a Collingwood pub. A stranger, “a big guy, a neck-tat dude”, asked whether they had a book club.

Certain he was about to be punched in the head, Leighton instead heard: “Can I join?” He says the answer established the method: “We just invited people who didn’t think they were invited. And we invited people in places where they didn’t usually get invited.”

Flyers in tattoo parlours, men’s barbers and boxing gyms brought immediate interest. Chapters are organised and run locally.

Leighton tried several names, but “every time I said Tough Guy Book Club and someone laughed, I got more and more determined to call it that”, he says. He believes toughness and reading had become separate, so combining them looked like “comedy”.

The incongruity works as a recruitment device, but it can also reinforce stereotypes about literacy and masculinity. Leighton, “I’m not what a reader looks like,” is not invited to the local literary festival. The typical member is not “telling you he wants to read more” and is not “walking around bookstores”.

His response is deliberately analogue. “We don’t want to do meetings online.” Meetings happen “in person, at the pub and in your neighbourhood”.

Former NRL player and BookTok sensation Luke Bateman shows how online space can provide a conduit to reading and a lifeline at his lowest. After a well-publicised breakdown brought on by a gambling addiction, Bateman retreated to his family farm. A single book-related post on TikTok, recorded from his tractor, went viral.

Bateman credits that incongruity to his appearance and background: “It’s unexpected that someone who looks like me and has my background would be so in love with reading and want to promote it so passionately.” Speaking from Brisbane, he adds: “I’ve read since I was a child; it’s a genuine and authentic part of me.”

“Reading transports me to somewhere I can exist without fear of ridicule,” he says. “I just get to experience a deep sense of joy.” Once catapulted into professional rugby, however, he repressed that love and would not let a teammate see him with a book.

“I had a lot of shame around my reading,” Bateman says. “I never saw men read. Reading was a feminine thing.” He adds: “Young boys need to see men read, see their heroes and role models share a love of literature.”

Bateman argues that the biggest barrier to men reading is other men, and that it begins early. On his podcast In The Good Books, he discusses a study with children’s author Scott Stuart.

Stuart says that when boys choose a book for themselves, “gender doesn’t enter the equation”; it can be pink or about fairies. When they choose for other boys, “suddenly all the female main characters disappear”. No study name, sample or effect size is supplied, so the evidence remains incomplete.

Bateman also points to declining reading rates among Australian men and women, with Gen X men the only demographic reading statistically less than women of the same age. His proposed remedy begins at home: “If you want your kids to be readers, you have to be a reader.”

He rejects placing the blame on children: “We can’t be placing the responsibilities of failing literacy rates upon children. As adults, that’s our responsibility; we’re the ones failing them.” He says corporations and capitalism have made life “frictionless”, while “reading requires friction, a little bit more effort.”

Bateman considers books essential “if we want our children to grow and prosper and evolve into fully integrated and capable, competent human beings”.

Leighton says he sees reading’s effects firsthand through a book club in prison. It also began with The Old Man and the Sea, and he encourages participants to join Tough Guy Book Club after release. He says: “When you’ve done 15 years, the only other guys you know are guys who’ve done 15 years.”

No participant count or outcome measure is given for the prison club, so its effect remains an anecdote. Leighton’s aim is simple: “I just wanted to give them another option. They can come hang out with us.”

What does this change for men who rarely read?

It provides a concrete first step: a 7pm meeting at a local pub, organised by local men, where reading is paired with conversation and wider friendship. For parents, Bateman’s standard is more demanding: children must see adults read. Membership alone does not establish a literacy gain.

Bateman believes reading lets young men see “that there are further possibilities for them outside the narrative they’ve been given”. Leighton puts the responsibility back on men: “Men are our own jailers and our own police officers on this,” he says. “Somewhere along the way we decided and then we just enforced it ourselves. We’re the only people who can help us out of that.”

With 10,000 members but no outcome data cited here, the next test is whether local pub meetings can turn into sustained reading at home.