Young men have stopped reading books – and these are the reasons why

I was sitting in my hotel room in Tasmania when news came through last week that Australians, but especially men, are reading less than ever before.

According to the new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the most common group of regular readers are now older women (48 per cent), compared with just 10.1 per cent of males aged 15 to 24. Given I’d just been at a book event where the crowd was predominantly female, and older too, this seemed to track.

Brandon Jack played 28 AFL games over five seasons for the Sydney Swans and has just published his second book.Credit: Tim Bauer

Despite now being a full-time writer, I was not the bookish type growing up. It wasn’t until I came across Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting in my mid-20s that the reading flame was ignited. From Welsh, I bounced to Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders and Charles Bukowski. My horizons have broadened since then, but they were the first literary loves that I held.

Reading is sometimes a chore, sometimes an experience that distracts me from the world and comforts me when I feel there is no one else around.

It’s well established that a love of reading sits in that nature-nurture Venn diagram. Access to books growing up, a moment of encouragement from a teacher, an internal spark with no rhyme or reason all help kids develop a love of reading. For many people, though, a connection with fiction is formed when a character says or thinks something that you have yourself said or thought.

So why are young men reading less? Perhaps podcasts are the culprit. A book is something to be consumed, yes, but it’s something to sit with and endure; to give time and effort towards. In the modern age, maybe podcasts, YouTube, Reddit forums and streamers have become that – the window of time for entertainment has been given to things which are easier to consume.

Or is chick-lit to blame? A string of generationally popular female authors captured the zeitgeist and spawned a mass of imitators thanks to social media, which has now moved to a new generation of romance and smut authors. Five of Australia’s 10 best-selling books in 2024 fit into this category (the others were two cookbooks, a children’s book, a self-help book and John Farnham’s memoir).

The percentage of men who would pick up any book at all is very small. The odds of them picking up or recommending Liane Moriarty or Sarah J. Maas (whose books were third and sixth on the bestseller list) to their mates is even smaller. Now it’s become a torrid cycle of supply and demand. No men read books, so no books get pushed to them. Dare I say it, there is no “dick-lit” (copyright: B Jack).

Has literature escaped the common man? Or has it become an escape from him. Publishers, worried about bottom lines in an industry that is already dealing with razor-thin margins, play it safe and stick to putting out what they know their established audience will like. Then there are the agents only looking to sign authors who “appeal to an older female audience”. (This was once said to me word for word by a prospective literary agent.)

Also running through my mind in that hotel room was the man sitting in front of me on my flight down from Sydney who was wearing a hat that read, “Diggin’ holes. Bangin’ moles.” Eavesdropping, I heard him say he was a miner, which explained the “diggin’ holes”. Unfortunately, there was no way of knowing about the “bangin’ moles” part. (I’m fairly confident he wasn’t acknowledging that moles run the risk of being banged by shovels whenever people are digging holes in the ground.)

It’s prejudicial to assume this guy isn’t a regular reader. But he had no book with him and was streaming Happy Gilmore, which gave me the impression he isn’t. And not to bang on about the hat, but the peak did say: “I get nice and deep.” Could he have meant emotionally? Who knows?

I found myself thinking about him and wondering how do we get a book to him? Do we want him to read a book? Does anyone even care what kinds of stories he’d connect with and see himself in?

Sure, any attempted renaissance of the Bukowski-ilk would rightly fail. That kind of bravado doesn’t hold up any more, we see through it. But those who do recognise parts of themselves in that bravado will not head straight to A Little Life with no warm-up.

At the moment in the world of books, it feels like no one’s even thinking about my “mole” banging friend. And as his hat let the plane know, he’s unlikely to be thinking about books.

Brandon Jack is the author of Pissants, and a freelance writer based in Sydney.