Latest News

August 31, 2022

If you’ve been around Tough Guy Book Club for a while, you’ll know we do monthly challenges. These challenges range from something a little strange like our unusual reading challenge, health related challenges like get your blood pressure checked, and club growth challenges like...

August 17, 2022

August 2022 saw one of our coolest challenges yet, with goons being encouraged to give blood as part of the TGBC Lifeblood donor team. Restrictions preventing former residents of the United Kingdom from donating had recently been lifted, so #NewBloods was perfectly timed to...

July 20, 2022

guer.ril.la (noun) A member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces. From the Spanish, diminutive of guerra meaning 'war' +++ What's the first thing we learned from this month's challenge, where goons were tasked with planting...

July 13, 2022

In June 2022, ten goons from all points of the compass and all walks of life met in Sydney’s southwest for a two-day workshop in suicide first aid. The commitment this involved is evidence that suicide is at the forefront of our collective conscience,...

June 22, 2022

The Tough Guy Book Club June #LastDrinks Challenge is a barrel aged kettle sour double dry hopped imperial triple india hazy pale oatmeal stout lager ale. It ranges anywhere from 0% to 12% ABV. Sometimes it looks more like tea, coffee or soft drink...

April 20, 2022

Is Tough Guy Book Club a drinking club with a reading problem, or the other way around? We get asked this question sometimes, but mostly because everyone’s mum used to come home from their book club hammered on Fruity Lexia. We’re never really felt...

April 20, 2022

Tough Guy Book Club takes January off (who wants to talk books when you're busy breaking your New Years resolutions?) so February is our first meeting of the year. That means it's also our first challenge. For 2022 we decided to dust off an...

April 19, 2022

Make no mistake, Dudley gets into it.   We've heard that not all book clubs actually talk about books. Tough Guy Book Club could easily fall into that category. We're the book club that meets in a pub after all - we're happy with...

April 13, 2022

Say you're at home. Doing whatever it is you do at home. Reading, we hope. Or sprawling on the couch watching TV, that's fine too. Now, say something terrible comes on the news. War, plague, fire... flood. It seems to happen more and more...

April 02, 2022

To tell the story of the Camp of the Sun Burnt River, the 2022 Summer Camp, we have to travel all the way back to the before times of 2020, when things were innocent and you wouldn’t think twice about cramming a bunch of...

March 29, 2022

February-March 2022 brought some of the worst flooding in Australia's history. Massive areas of NSW and Queensland vanished underwater. Some of them haven't emerged yet, and there's more rain coming. It's shit, and it hurts, and it's going to hurt for a while. We'll...

March 23, 2022

Do you have trouble explaining to other dudes what Tough Guy Book Club is about? Is it weird telling them you're in a book club in the first place? It shouldn't be, right? One day maybe. In the meantime if your mates look at...

March 23, 2022

You know what's tough? Finding time to read. We get that. It's one of the reasons we exist. Life is complicated, responsibilities are many, and work is sometimes the only time you get to yourself. That's pretty shit and we're trying to do something...

March 08, 2022

Tough Guy Book Club is everywhere. You can find us in big cities and small towns, on the coast and in the hills. You can find us in pubs and breweries and RSLs, by the highway or the railroad tracks, anywhere men want something...

February 20, 2022

The year was I can’t remember, but my girlfriend (now wife) and I had started a new yearly tradition of driving our campervan from Sydney to Melbourne (and back again) for Christmas, stopping in Beechworth for a few days each way. In those days...

February 09, 2022

Years ago, when he was travelling in Canada, Daniel Westall went to a mate's house to see his new big screen TV. It was mostly for watching hockey (because Canada) and the mate told a story about his playing days. After a couple of...

January 12, 2022

There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and Tough Guy Book Club has an opinion on every single one of them. Naked City, the Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps. Call it what you want, it's big and loud and famous...

December 23, 2021

One of the best things about books is pushing your favourite ones on other people. Actually, that's not just true of books. Films, music, food, cars, sports, gadgets, places to travel - we do it with fucking everything. If you love something it's only...

November 24, 2021

As 2021 came to a close, we had our last TGBC meeting, and our last challenge of the year. It’s no secret that December and January are big recruiting drives for us. These are the months where a lot of guys who aren’t yet...

November 14, 2021

Hey, remember when we got a writeup in Tradie magazine? Remember print magazines? Neither did we! But not only do they still exist, there's apparently more than one of them because we're in the news again. This time it's an article in Skippers, the...

October 20, 2021

Every month at Tough Guy Book Club, we set ourselves a challenge. Not just the challenge of getting a bunch of men to read a piece of fiction, which is hard enough. We're talking about meaningful, worthwhile shit you can do with your free...

October 13, 2021

Another month, another new Tough Guy Book Club chapter. That’s not to say we’re only opening one new chapter a month (it seems like it’s been at least new one every month), it’s just that between reading books, hitting the pub, and generally just...

September 15, 2021

We reckon we’ve got a pretty bloody good thing going at Tough Guy Book Club. A bunch of goons getting together every month at the pub to catch up with some rowdy conversation and discuss the month’s book, what could be better? Do you...

September 15, 2021

TGBC is a book club. Each month the club sets a challenge. Beyond reading, the benefits of being part of this book club are legion; a sense of belonging, the friendships, interaction both with those of like mind and those who aren't. Another benefit...

August 04, 2021

Dubbo is famous for lots of things. It has an observatory, a cool old gaol, some limestone caves, a whopping great zoo, and now most importantly, a chapter of Tough Guy Book Club. "I've been part of this club for two years," says Dan...