Last week, The Ankler published a much-shared and loved list of books 100 notables — top actors, executives, creators, politicians, authors and Hollywood power players — are recommending this summer. The answers were thoughtful, surprising and occasionally intimidating.
The list also forced me to make an uncomfortable confession. I have abandoned books.
There, I said it.
In fact, I — a professional writer and editor — have not finished a book in 20 years.
And I am in terrible company.
“I don’t read books. I read articles and summaries,” the widely pilloried influencer known as Clavicular (Braden Peters) said recently in a video. “People focus so hard on thinking books are going to make them this wise jester. But in reality, you can just get the information through summaries and articles 10 times more efficiently. I can learn 10x the rate of you if you’re reading books versus articles and summaries.”
He added, “I’m more of an article guy.”
Technically, I read all the time — doomscrolling through my For You tab on X (ask me about the New York media’s response to the Mets firing manager Carlos Mendoza; or maybe don’t, so you can save yourself a rant), reading books to my daughter at bedtime, scouring Wikipedia to find out what happens in Obsession so I’m ready for the jump scares. I read for work, too — including this very paragraph, several times over!
But I don’t even remember the last fiction book I read in full — for recreation or at all. The last nonfiction work I completed was written by my wife, a complete history of the 2000 hit teen comedy Bring It On. If I’m being honest, that might be the only book I’ve read cover to cover in the two decades since.
You see, I’m more of an article guy.
The data suggests something stranger than laziness or short attention spans. Reading overall is down, fiction sales are actually climbing, and what counts as “reading a book” has been gradually redefined in American classrooms over two decades — from finishing novels to parsing excerpts and scripted curricula. The men skipping books today may be part of the first generation that was never really asked to finish one.
That said, not all men have abandoned books. My god, some even recommend them. So before fully surrendering to the article-guy lifestyle, I asked seven men of taste — Bruce Bozzi, Colin Callender, Bill Damaschke, Chuck Klosterman, Andrew Rannells, Al Roker and Widow’s Bay actor Kingston Rumi Southwick — what books they suggest.
But first, I wanted to understand how we got here — and what it means for an industry supposedly built on storytelling.
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