I couldn't believe my luck when our Year 7 English teacher said an author would be visiting our class.
"I need a volunteer to introduce them," he added, and my hand went up like a helium balloon. I'd loved books since before I could read, and here was my chance to be hype-boy for an actual real-life writer - like I was their biographer, or even their friend. All week, I practised my 20-second speech; and when the big day came, I reknotted my school tie, tucked my shirt into my undies and strode to the front of the classroom. There, I delivered the Sermon on the Mount of author introductions. "Blessed are us students for this person writes books."
Jump forward two years, and when our Year 9 English teacher told us that another writer was coming to class, I kept my hand down.
This time, a different boy stood up with a fist full of cue cards and a lemon-sized tie knot. The lip of his jocks peeked up from his belt like the tip of a nylon iceberg. From the back of the room, I wondered: why would he do this to himself?
It wasn't that I disliked reading. Secretly, I was thrilled to have another author visiting. But I didn't want other kids knowing that. Mine was an all-boys school where the "jock vs nerd" divide was bulked up and thriving. Real boys did manly things, like footy and cadets. Reading was a shameful pleasure - one you kept private, if you did it at all.
It's well documented that Aussie teens are reading less. ABS data from last year found that just 11.5 per cent of Gen Z (ages 15-24) still read. That drops to 10.1 per cent of males - the lowest of any cohort.
There's a whole laundry list of reasons why. We can blame falling literacy rates, underfunded schools cutting teacher librarians, or English classes dissecting musty old texts as if they're dead frogs.
We can blame the competition from video games, apps, streaming and social media - those dopamine-dripping mediums that outcompete books for free time. And when teens see their parents also glued to screens, where's the impetus to pick up a book?
But for teenage boys, there's another complication - one that hit hardest for Year 9 me - and it's the perception that reading for pleasure is unmasculine.
Stereotypes around masculinity have never gone away, but online "bro culture" has returned them to the fore. Success for online boys looks like biceps, money, hot girls and power. Like online gaming, it's about dominance: level up, gear up and take others down.
Indeed, the worst extremes of this culture - including cyberbullying, revenge porn and normalised misogyny - were among the justifications for December's social media ban. But for many teenage boys, hypermasculine online culture has already left a mark, just as my own school's alpha-male values left their mark on me.
Reading, meanwhile, is decidedly "unmasculine". It's not athletic, competitive or social. You don't become the "alpha" in a wolfpack of boys by burying your snout in a book. If anything, reading is submissive: it demands your full attention and removes you from reality.
As an adult, those are things I love about reading. As a teenage boy, they reinforced that books were for nerds and recluses.
The saddest part is reading can actually help to combat toxic masculinity. Hypermasculine values are about control and dominance, while reading teaches empathy and compassion. That's what two 2015 studies from the University of Liverpool and US National Library of Medicine showed, and it's hardly surprising. After all, by reading from perspectives beyond our own, we learn to see others and ourselves in new, more sympathetic lights.
So, how can we get more teenage boys reading? This was the question I faced when writing my own novel - Poster Boys, and there's no easy solution.
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As a writer, it meant reflecting on high-school-aged me, then writing a book that he'd want to read: a book that understood how complicated it is to be an Aussie teenager; with all the page-turning humour, entertainment and action you need to compete with modern-day media. Then promoting that book ad nauseum until people cave and try it.
As a society, it'll take cultural change. It'll take more parents reading, more male role models promoting books, books for boys pushed through BookTok and traditional media, schools prioritising reading for pleasure, an investment in teacher librarians. Maybe that's all too big an ask, but hey, I'm a reader: I love to say "What if ...".
That said, I do think we have a unique opportunity in 2026. For many teenagers, the social media ban has thrown a spanner into their online lives, and while the spanner may not stick, it is an opening for boys to try reading for fun again. Now it's up to us to help them access the books they'll actually want to read.
And the good news is they already exist - if you know where to find them. Sure, there are fewer contemporary books aimed at teenage boys than girls, but there are millions of great books already out there, waiting for the right teen to open their pages.
That's where you come in. Chat to your local librarian or bookshop about your teen's interests. Have a look online, chat to their English teacher, or maybe read a few Young Adult books yourself.
You'll be helping your teen find characters and worlds that connect with them empathetically - in a way the internet can't. And we can rebuild their passion for reading one book at a time.
Year 7 me will thank you for it.
About the author
Scott Woodard is the author of the new novel for young adults, Poster Boys (Hachette, $19.99), a coming-of-age satire set at a snobby high school.
A former commercial radio presenter, Woodard holds a bachelor of creative writing from RMIT under the tutelage of Toni Jordan. Poster Boys is the Canberra-based public servant's debut novel. He says his debut chapbook You Haven't Found Anything, published in 2015, is still available in all good landfills.
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