What You're Reading: Results from our Summer Reading Survey

This summer, Fortune’s Path sent a survey to all of its newsletter subscribers and LinkedIn followers. We had seen reports that Americans are reading more than ever, but reading fewer books. We wondered, what, then, were they reading, and how were they accessing the content? The results of our informal poll are in.

We’ve been sharing book recommendations gleaned from the results in our daily newsletter. Here, we want to examine the ways in which our readers, a multi-generational bunch, are consuming non-book content – primarily “the news.” 

Our survey sample was small, but we like to think they represent a smart set of thinking people, representative of America’s finest minds. (Who else would subscribe to our newsletter?) We heard from 21 of you, across four generations: four baby boomers, six Gen Xers, six Millennials, and five Gen Zers. More than half (12) of our respondents made time to read more than 10 books last year. They’re reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, across a wide variety of topics. 

Where Survey Respondents Get Their News

When it comes to news consumption, our survey respondents were also all over the map. We asked respondents to rank their favorite sources of information based on the following choices: Twitter, newsletters, podcasts, print/online newspapers, print/online magazines, and TV. 

Newspapers were the clear winner in this popularity contest. 

Print/online newspapers as their #1 way to keep up with the news

• Boomer - 2

• Gen X - 4

• Millennial - 2

• Gen Z - 1

It’s Not Newsletters

Clear losers in this contest include TV and, much to our dismay, newsletters. Only one respondent (a Gen Xer who sends a daily newsletter himself) chose newsletters as his number one way to keep up with the news. 

Twitter had more cross-generational appeal than we expected. Only Gen Xers eschewed the social platform in their responses. 

Twitter as their #1 way to keep up with the news: 

• Boomer - 1

• Gen X - 0

• Millennial - 1

• Gen Z - 3

Millennials are the Podcast Audience

The only generation listening to podcasts as their primary way to keep up with the news are Millennials. Two respondents cited the modern format as their preference. They specifically mentioned NPR’s podcasts and the Axios Today podcast as their shows of choice. 

We also asked respondents to provide a list of their top three sources of information on current events. Here are the tallies for the number of times each source was mentioned. 

• The New York Times: 10

• Twitter: 8 (two respondents specified that they only follow specific journalists or writers on Twitter)

• The Wall Street Journal: 5

• NPR: 4

• The Washington Post: 4

• Local papers: 4

• Google News: 3

• BBC: 2

• Bloomberg: 2

• The Download (MIT Technology Review newsletter): 2

• The Atlantic: 2

• TV of any kind: 1

Mentioned only one time: The Economist; Axios; LA Times; Nature; CNN; Associated Press; Apple News; CNBC; Substack newsletters (Big, YLE, Gooze News); The Today Show; TikTok; Reddit; Instagram; PBS Newshour; and local TV news.

The Summer Book Read

Here’s what our audience was reading when our survey came out: 

Non-Fiction: 

• A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

• Blink by Malcom Gladwell

• The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

• The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas & Andrew Hunt

• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

• The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro

• With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge 

• Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession by Dave Jamieson

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow

• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Fiction: 

• The Forgotten by David Baldacci

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

• The Hotel in Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand

• It by Stephen King

• The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Masood

• Razzmatazz by Chrisopher Moore

• The Dry by Jane Harper

• Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Why they’re Reading

Here are our survey respondents’ recommendations and why they recommended them: 

• On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. It's mind blowing.

• Range by David Epstein. Shared with a group of product managers because the content of the book validated some truths about our role and the makeup of a good PM.

• Saved by a Song, an excellent memoir by Mary Gautier.

• Zero Day by David Baldacci. Liked the story.

• Trust by Hernan Diaz. An intriguing look at wealth and the wealthy. A good investment for any reader.

• The No Asshole Rule by Robert I. Sutton. Because they were dealing with one! 

• Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka. I thought my brother would like it.

• The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro. If you want to know what motivates people to positions of great authority and control, this is your guide.

• The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. It's the best breakdown of the lead up to 9/11 that I’ve ever seen in one place.

• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Because everyone should read Moby-Dick.

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Mostly based on writing style and completeness of thought.

• God Land by Lyz Lenz to my mother, because it is a first person account told by an author who reminded me of her.

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I listened to a podcast about the origins of the true crime genre, and they discussed this book. I started it and it remains a page-turner many decades later. I recommended it to my "book friend," who I regularly trade recs with.

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford: Working with our engineering leadership to make improvements.