I recently submitted my doctoral thesis about the intersection of masculinities, shame and suburbia in Christos Tsiolkas’ The Jesus Man and Peter Polites’ The Pillars. The research was mainly around how that intersection may lead to violence and the loss of moral compass in men. The respective protagonists both engage in abhorrent behaviour—Tommy murders a man and castrates himself, and Pano poses as a gay Muslim refugee opposing the development of a mosque. I zig-zagged through both books multiple times over the years, alongside theory from Raewyn Connell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn and Brigid Rooney. It felt right to read cis-male writers and characters through the lens of very intelligent women, most of them Australian too.

I didn’t read much for pleasure throughout those three and a half years because I often felt guilty if I wasn’t researching or writing. It means that I’ve ended up with a TBR pile that I keep adding to, which is annoying because I know that when it’s too tall I’ll give up on words entirely and go into the wild or something drastic like that. I came across the acronym ‘TBR’ on Instagram the other day. It grosses me out to use it. My undergrads said that there is a whole section on TikTok called BookTok, which I found fascinating, and when I asked about the kind of books that BookTokers suggest or review they told me about a popular series that started out as Harry Styles fan fiction on Wattpad. I had to Google ‘Wattpad’.