Open Thread: Your Summer Reading?

What’s on Your List for the Sultry Months? Here’s a Look at Mine

Last summer the entire literary world either laughed, cringed, sneered, or railed when not one, but two(!), U.S. newspapers published a summer reading list containing several imaginary books.

The guide “recommended not only fake books such as Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende and The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, but also imaginary titles from authors Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee and Rebecca Makkai,” reported the Washington Post. The culprit? A freelance writer using AI who didn’t check the work.

I’m pro-AI in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of uses—probably to the annoyance of some of you. But we all know the best reading lists are personal, not algorithmic. I want to know what actual books actual humans are actually reading. And with that in mind, here’s a look at what my eyes are planning to hoover up this summer. I want to hear what’s on your list, too; tell me below.

Photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash

Just the Facts, Ma’am

For me, let’s start with the nonfiction. I’m looking forward to several titles right now:

• Laura B. McGrath’s Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

• Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though They Might Destroy You)

• Kevin Ashton’s The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art

• Christian Miller’s The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World

The last two have quite a bit to say about where we find ourselves with AI.

Stranger than Fact?

But man cannot live on facts alone, at least not this one. I crave fiction, especially the classic stuff. I’ve got three in particular already queued up from my big-ass classic novel goal:

June

• Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

July

• Cervantes’s Don Quixote

August

• Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

I just finished Tom Jones last night and I’m jonesing to jump into Tristram Shandy. The trick with these huge novels is they take a lot of bandwidth. Shandy is thankfully somewhat shorter than others I’ve read for this project. But if I have time, here are a few others I’m looking forward to:

• S.L. Huang’s The Language of Liars—not about AI as far as I can tell :)

• Seishi Yokomizo’s She Walks at Night

• Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky and The Penultimate Truth—the second of which does feature a plot element that foreshadows modern LLM concerns.

Now’s the time to share your own summer reading plans. I want lists: real or speculative, earnest or fanciful. I’d prefer the real you, as would we all. What do you want to read this summer?

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