Pride and no prejudice: how Tough Guy Book Club taught 10,000 men to be unashamed of reading

When founder Shay Leighton put fliers in tattoo parlours, barbers and boxing gyms in Australia, men quickly responded – then it went global. But why do some feel such baggage about books?

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

For 14 years, Leighton has run the Tough Guy Book Club, a not-for-profit charity dedicated to encouraging men to read – although he’s quick to stress that they do more than just that. “We’re not a reading club, we’re a talking club,” he says. “The three goals of book club are: read more, talk more, have more friends.”

Leighton was once a tough kid himself but in 2012 he found himself in need of purpose: “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 a way “to get me out of the house cause I had pretty much fucked my life up”.

At the start, the club was just Leighton and his mate Tom Scott. As they sat discussing their first book – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea – in the beer garden of a Collingwood pub, they had an encounter that would change everything. A stranger, “a big guy, a neck-tat dude”, approached and asked if they were in a book club. When Leighton confirmed they were, certain that he was about to get punched in the head, the man immediately asked, “Can I join?”

“We just invited people who didn’t think they were invited,” Leighton says. “And we invited people in places where they didn’t usually get invited.”

When they put fliers up in tattoo parlours, men’s barbers and boxing gyms, the interest was immediate: Tough Guy Book Club now runs chapters in 10 countries and has 10,000 members worldwide. Individual chapters are organised and run locally, meeting at 7pm on the first Wednesday of every month.

As for the name, several variations were tried out but “every time I said Tough Guy Book Club and someone laughed, I got more and more determined to call it that”, Leighton says. “Because those two things, toughness and reading, for some reason they’ve become so separate that, when you push them together, people think you’re doing comedy.”

Incongruity is a powerful weapon and a great recruitment tool but it can also reinforce cultural stereotypes around literacy and masculinity, something Leighton is fighting to change. “I’m not what a reader looks like,” he says. “I’m not invited to the local literary festival.” The typical Tough Guy Book Club member “is not telling you he wants to read more; he’s not walking around bookstores”. The focus is determinedly analogue, too; the club is only held “in person, at the pub and in your neighbourhood. We don’t want to do meetings online.”

For former NRL player and BookTok sensation Luke Bateman, the online space was an essential conduit to the world of reading and a lifeline when he was at his lowest. After a well-publicised breakdown brought on by a gambling addiction, Bateman retreated to his family farm, where a single book-related post on TikTok – recorded from his tractor – went viral. He clocks that down to incongruity, too.

“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,” he says, over the phone from Brisbane. “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. I just get to experience a deep sense of joy.”

It wasn’t always the case, though. As soon as Bateman was catapulted into the world of professional rugby, he learned to repress his love of reading, and certainly would never let a teammate see him with a book. “I had a lot of shame around my reading. I never saw men read. Reading was a feminine thing. Young boys need to see men read, see their heroes and role models share a love of literature.”

The biggest barrier to men reading is other men. And it happens early. In his podcast In The Good Books, Bateman talks to children’s author Scott Stuart about a study on boys’ reading that illuminates something essential about boys and their relationship with books. When boys are asked to choose a book for themselves, “gender doesn’t enter the equation”, Stuart explains. It can be pink, it can be about fairies, boys don’t care. “But when they are asked to choose for other boys, suddenly all the female main characters disappear.”

While reading rates are declining among men and women in Australia – gen X men are the only demographic that reads statistically less than women of the same age – Bateman believes passionately that we can turn those numbers around if we start in the home.

“If you want your kids to be readers, you have to be a reader. 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. We live in a world that corporations and capitalism have wanted to make very easy for us, frictionless. But reading requires friction, a little bit more effort.”

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

Leighton sees the transformational effects of reading in men firsthand. He runs a book club in a prison – they also started with The Old Man and the Sea – and he encourages them to join Tough Guy Book Club once they’re out.

“When you’ve done 15 years, the only other guys you know are guys who’ve done 15 years. I just wanted to give them another option. They can come hang out with us.”

When men read, the whole community benefits. Bateman believes that reading lets young men see “that there are further possibilities for them outside the narrative they’ve been given”. For Leighton, men must actively tear down their own assumptions about reading and masculinity – because no one else can do it for them.

“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.”