How an AI-Generated Summer Reading List REALLY Got Published by Several Major Outlets: an open letter to major news outlets
Oh, uh, it happened because nobody gives a fuck about books and reading.
Woof, starting off fiery today.
You probably heard by now that a freelance writer made an AI generate a summer reading list, then, I guess, just sent it out without even checking it, and then it got published in newspapers like The Chicago Sun-Times, that’s right, THE BRIGHT ONE!
Chicago, I’ve dedicated my life to defending your deep dish pizza, which I maintain is more delicious than any other pizza (EVERYONE from New York will be like, “It’s not foldable, you can’t walk around with it!” and I’m like, “Since when is portability a good measure of food deliciousness!? Who critiques a steak because it’s hard to eat while you wait for a bus?”). Your hot dogs are the objectively correct version of hot dogs, your riverwalk is the best, and your city is one I deeply love.
And now you went and published AI booklist slop, kicked me right in the bookshelves.
Anyway, readers of major publications opened papers and inserts to find a book list with 15 titles, 5 of which were real, and 10 of which were completely made up.
And then I found out about it, and because books, reading, and especially SUMMER READING are library turf, I feel the need to say something about it.
Which brings us to right now.
There was a lot of hullabaloo around “How could this happen?” but that’s not the real story here because we all know how this happened: Some guy was supposed to write a summer reading book list, he put a prompt into an AI chatbot, probably something like, “Summer book list, diverse set of authors, mix of contemporary with a couple older, obscure books in there,” boom, done.
Nobody checked it, and here we are.
The more interesting bit is that AI that seems to operate a little like a dopey, eager-to-please doggo who will do whatever you ask, even if what you’re asking for is impossible. Instead of telling you, “No, that’s not possible,” it’ll just cobble together whatever it can and hand it over, wide-eyed and panting, waiting for a pat on the head.
For example, if you ask an AI for a list of sources that make a specific point, and it cannot find those sources, it might just go ahead and make them up. This is a phenomenon that AI purveyors have branded as “hallucinating references,” but I think the more accurate term, the one we’d use for non-artificial intelligence, would be “lying.”
I tested this myself. I asked ChatGPT for a list of books by Chuck Palahniuk published in 2025, and it returned the book Shock Induction and said it was released February 6, 2025. Good book, only problem is that its pub date is October 8, 2024. Which I know because I preordered that one. And read the original, serialized version in Palahniuk’s newsletter. I’m pretty aware of Chucky P.’s output.
What’s really weird is that if you look the book up and include that date in your search, you WILL get this Amazon page:
Then, if you click the paperback version, you get this:
Which is probably an accurate release date for the paperback, though I wouldn’t call a paperback edition of an existing book a “publication.” Which, we could argue about it, but I don’t want to (and regardless, the Feb 6 date still doesn’t make sense).
And then, if you click BACK to the hardcover version, which gave the 2025 date, you’ll get this, the correct date:
Something weird is going on over at Amazon, but let me reassure you, as someone who owns a fair amount of Chuck Palahniuk nonsense, including a Japanese edition of Fight Club as well as two Chuck Palahniuk Playaways, that 2024 is the pub date.
This is one of the lesser-discussed problems with AI as it functions today, the desire to come up with AN answer superseding the need to come up with the right answer.
If you hire a builder to build you a custom house, based on your designs, part of what you hire that builder to do is to look over your wacky ideas and make sure that this house you’ve designed is actually, you know, a structure that can exist in the physical world. If it’s not possible to, say, have a full brick pizza oven on the second floor that shoots pizzas out into a chute that leads directly to your mouth when you’re sitting on the couch, your expectation would probably be that the builder would tell you what’s not possible and work with you to come up with a compromise or perhaps a suggestion that you just have pizza delivered.
In our dream home scenario, the AI style would be to dive in, start building the house based on your directions, and when a pizza-related fire destroyed the entire complex within days, well, you didn’t ask if that would happen, did you?
When you build something like a book list, you need to be aware of AI’s limitations, and one of its major current limitations is that it seems very eager to please, even if what it thinks will be pleasing is actually quite the opposite.
I can’t say for certain why this is. It may be because each AI transaction is quite expensive in terms of usage of power and water, so perhaps the AI is trained, to some extent, to find the path of least resistance, even if that means making things up.
Perhaps AI is trained to answer your questions exactly as posed, to assume the user’s premise, that Chuck Palahniuk published a novel in 2025, is correct, and to seek out an answer with the assumption that there’s one to be found.
Whatever the reason is, the sort of shocking thing is that it’s entirely possible to create a booklist much like the one the AI built, but using actual, real books. It doesn’t NEED to lie, but it did.
And then you all threw that lie up on stage and waited for us all to applaud.
A Quick Note for Publishers
Guys, this lack of double-checking tells me you don’t use affiliate links.
Look into it. You’re in for a surprise.
Not having affiliate links on these lists, even in QR form, is not only putting your ignorance on display, it’s leaving money on the table.
I don’t use affiliate links because I’m a fucking librarian and a fucking writer, and I make my money the old-fashioned way: by not making any money and celebrating when I get a sweet coupon at the store as though that’s the same thing as making money.
Also I don’t have like millions of subscribers, so for me it’s pretty silly, I’d make like 50 cents in a year and then have to fill out an entire section of a tax form for it.
The Contents
Let’s start with the 5 books, out of a total of 15, that are real, and let’s talk about why these aren’t stellar recommendations.
It’s good to talk about these because they actually exist, so we can investigate how good they are in terms of being additions to the list.
I mean, fuck me, the real ones are even clumped together at the end. Nobody even checked THE FIRST TITLE ON THE LIST.
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan: Uh, importantly, and missing from the list entirely, there are two English versions of this. One was a translation done by Sagan herself, and it removed a lot of the sexy bits. The other, a 2013 translation, preserves the pantydropper parts we actually want to read. When you put a book from 1954 on your list that was originally written in French and has a sexy and unsexy version, YOU NEED TO BE MORE SPECIFIC. HOW SEXY ARE WE ABOUT TO GET?
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter: Here’s where we get into one of my big beefs with this list, my Wendy’s Triple Stack, if you will: Beautiful Ruins is a fine, 12 year-old book that has garnered a ton of critical and reader praise, has been a perennial favorite, gotten reviews in major publications, has 182,000 ratings on Amazon, and today it’s #459 in fiction on Amazon, not bad for a book that’s been out for over a decade.
Giving us Beautiful Ruins is…fine, but it’s not giving us anything remotely new. Bonjour Tristesse, I have no idea whether that was a big thing during its release in 1954, I’ve never heard of it, maybe it’s a little under the radar, but Jess Walter is by no means an indie darling these days an uncovered gem that needs digging up with that blush brush they always use to clean off fossils in Jurassic Park movies.
There’s not much use to a booklist that insists on giving us books that I’d call ultra-popular, books that are probably on the shelf at the airport bookstore.
I tried calling my local-ish airport bookstore. They have a 1-800 number, which is nice because you shouldn’t have to pay any fees for a number that just rings until you give up because Fuck It, I’ve already made my point.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury: originally published in 1957, same problems as Beautiful Ruins, plus, as readers of this newsletter know, we only fuck with Ray Bradbury stories that involve the planet Mars and/or a Rube Goldberg suicide/murder machine. Yes, I’m aware that Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, a book that everyone thinks is about government censorship but is actually about the way we’ll SELF-censor and sacrifice being informed in order to be comfortable and at peace. This is a book I probably should love as someone who cares a lot about book censorship, but I don’t love it because it’s a bit of a slog, if I’m honest, and because I’ve lost a lot of faith that people actually care about book censorship outside of moments it directly affects them.
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman: HUGELY popular book, plus it’s a movie. Don’t give me a summer reading list with books that have been made to movies on it unless those movies have tasteless nudity in them or the movie was made by some dummy in their backyard and is only beloved because there are some people out there who have watched entirely too many movies and seem to be desperate for anything with some small spark of ingenuity.
Atonement by Ian McEwan: ALSO a movie, half a MILLION ratings on Amazon. Nobody needs to be told about Atonement. It’s probably one of the better-known literary fictions of the 21st century so far.
What I’m getting at here is that these are awesome books, but they’re not really books that need promo, and I question how many new readers you’re introducing to them. People who read booklists like this, I think there’s a pretty good chance they’re aware of these books already.
I mean, the median age of the 5 real books is 37 years old. These books have been around for a good chunk of time, there have been a lot of opportunities for people to connect with them.
I know, some people are like, “Pete, dummy, any booklist is someone’s first booklist, so it’s worthwhile to put some mainstream titles on there.”
First of all, NEVER use a mutated Stan Lee quote on ME.
Second, a good booklist will have a couple all-stars on it, sure. All-stars are composed entirely of stars for a reason.
But this list, between its real and fake books, is almost entirely known authors, almost entirely the sorts of books we’d all be hearing about absolutely everywhere, in every review magazine, every mainstream outlet. These are the sorts of things that are about as close to unavoidable as books get.
Can’t you give me something that I may not know about already? Does your other news content contain stories about things we already know, like the fact that daytime is brighter than night, or that Chicago deep dish is king of pizzas (even though you really made it tough for me, I stand by you, Chicago)?
Dick Move
I’ve seen quite a few reactions where people are like, “Actually, that made-up book sounds dope, give me that.”
Which, fuck off.
It was a dick move of the papers to publish this shit because, fuck me, maybe authors aren’t crowdsourcing ideas because they, you know, they’re authors with thoughts and ideas, human beings who have done a fucking good job entertaining us so far, so maybe we just let ‘em cook instead of giving them our stupid ideas.
It’s totally fine to have stupid ideas. I have them constantly. Hence this newsletter. But what’s not fine is to tweet at Isabel Allende and to say, “Hey, go ahead and write my stupid idea into a novel.”
Putting this list out has put some authors into a bit of a spot where maybe they’re getting feedback on ideas that don’t interest them, ideas they would never otherwise have to answer for. And that sucks.
Can You Hire ONE Person Who Gives a Fuck About Books or Shut the Fuck Up?
I mean, seriously, Isabelle Allende’s fake title is in here, and she had a book come out in 2025 already, like 2 weeks before this article ran. I know my girl Izzy is prolífica, but do we really think she has two novels coming out that close together?
Min Jin Lee has TWO real books out, and they were 10 years apart.
Look, I’m not shitting on these authors or their output, I’m saying that when a Min Jin Lee is coming out, it’s important. When Brit Bennett has a new book, we’ll all know.
Someone with even mild interest in the world of books would be able to look at this list, notice there are a lot of BIG titles they’ve never heard of, and use THAT information to say, waitaminute, either this is one of the biggest release summers of all time, or this list smells a little shitty. And by “a little shitty,” I mean shitty like “brimming porta-shitter turned upside down” shitty.
Oh, Right, The Shut The Fuck Up Part
It’s obvious that none of you care even a little.
If you’re not going to care even a little, then quit wasting everyone’s time with garbage.
If it’s not worth writing, and if it’s not worth editing, then it’s not worth reading.
If it’s not worth one writer’s time, one editor’s time, then it’s definitely not worth the time of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of readers.
If you have 100,000 readers, and they all spent 2 minutes reading that list, consider how much time you’ve wasted. Consider how you could’ve taken a small fraction of that time to write and edit something real, sparing all of us this nonsense.
So do us all a favor: If you’re not going to put in the effort, just skip it. Put in a picture of a squirrel doing something cute. Just reprint a real list from 1996. Even if it’s kinda lousy, it’s better than actively wasting our time.
What This Reminds Us About AI
RFK Jr’s stupidass HHS document contained a bunch of citations that referenced AI-made-up documents.
This is (and let me adjust my accusatory hat here) what happens when you command an AI to give you citations about things that are wrong, like vaccines killing more people than they’ve helped, so that you can make a shitload of money by suing vaccine manufacturers.
AI is still pretty unreliable for non-fiction information because, given a non-fiction task that’s informed by, well, bullshit, instead of telling you that your search for information is dumb and you’re dumb for doing it, it’ll create fictional answers without distinguishing between fact and fiction. A differentiation that Jonathan Frakes taught us is incredibly important.
AI is like an eager puppy, which is a wonderful thing to be around, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re looking for scientific backing about something, a dumbass, lovable Labrador who just wants to please you, even if what you’re asking for is stupid or unreasonably or fictional—that lab isn’t who you want fetching the science. Even though they’d look cute as fuck in a lil labcoat. A Labrador labcoat!
It also reminds us that this is the WRONG use of AI.
You shouldn’t be coming up with your conclusions, then asking AI to back them up. You should be reading the relevant research and only then coming to a conclusion. You should be asking AI for the research on a topic, then reading that research.
Likewise, a booklist shouldn’t be built by asking a machine for books to slot into spaces. Books shouldn’t be put into a list because they are good books to put into a list.
They should go into a list because they’re interesting, fun, different, intriguing. Maybe they bring something new to the table.
Having an AI fill a booklist is like filling an art museum by size: Just determine which sizes of paintings you want, and whatever’s available in those dimensions, boom, done.
The Problem You’re Creating
If I can’t trust you to vet a book list, to give it an editorial glance, how much faith am I supposed to put in, well, anything you report?
As information professionals, we try really hard to show people good sources, information we assume has been checked and re-checked, and when you do stuff like this, it makes it difficult to point people in your direction.
Yes, it’s a booklist, it’s not the end of the world to get it wrong.
But when I show a library user an article in a major newspaper, and they say, “Didn’t they also run a book list with books in it that don’t even exist?” …what am I supposed to say to that?
And when you run a book list with this bad info in it, what reassurance do I have that your other stuff is vetted? How do I know that this is the exception as opposed to being the rule?
It’s a rough information environment out there. It’s difficult to get people to trust things that are legit, that are giving them solid info that they need to make important decisions in their lives.
Don’t take yourselves out of the game.
Pete’s AI Test
If it’s not worth writing, then it’s not worth reading.
If it’s not worth one writer’s time, then it’s definitely not worth the time of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of readers.
If it’s not worth ONE editor’s time, it’s not worth ONE reader’s time.
So do us all a favor and just skip it.
Never has that been more evident than it is here.
Because, hey, if we’re all just using AI, I can type into an AI chatbot, too, and I can ask it for things that are actually specific to me, not what the unwashed masses, the trash, the plebs are reading.
There we go, that’s the stuff.
Here’s Why Librarians Are Better: My 15-Book Summer Reading List
Not one to just complain (a lot, about many things), I’ll show you now that I can do better than an AI.
A couple caveats:
This is a list of my tastes and things I like as opposed to a list of what I think OTHER people should read. What are modern book lists without personal taste? I think that’s the future: someone expressing their specific taste as opposed to trying to establish that their taste is “good” or that certain titles are “the best.”
This list has a little blurb for each book that’s designed to be fun to read as much as it is designed to promote a book. A booklist is only as good as its readability.
I suspect this list isn’t super diverse (I actually don’t know the genders or sexuality of most of these writers, it’s not something I investigate when it comes to my personal reading), however, it’s honest, it’s stuff I’ve read in the last couple years, and to tell the truth, I’ve been on a real manga tear for a couple years now, so the diversity of my authors hasn’t been high. As a reader of a library-based blog, I think you’re very capable of finding other lists (if you’re not, let me know, I’ll dedicate an issue to this exact process). In the interest of adding in some important names here, a few authors I love who I haven’t read recently, but are still ones I’ve really enjoyed: Percival Everett, Ezra Claytan-Daniels, Christopher Priest, Anna Anthropy, Lidia Yuknavitch, Nami Mun. I also like Jason Reynolds a lot, although I may enjoy him more as a speaker than I do as an author. Not because he’s a bad author, but because he’s an incredible speaker.
I think the online environment is about lots of people making lots of different lists, and if you’ve read something lately that you think is amazing, put it in the comments!
I’m not saying this is the best book list or the only books you should read, not even saying these are the best ever. It’s just a bunch of shit I like and shit I have shit to say about, and I think that’s better because, well, I think a booklist should say something about the person who made it. The way we perceive the world and explain it to other people reveals things about us. Which is why it’s so disappointing for someone to use AI to make one: Why throw away your chance to be heard and understood?
That is some deep, deep bullshit. Here’s the list.
1. Dead Detective Mountain by John Swartzwelder
This guy writes the funniest books ever. Here’s a passage from a short story where the hero of Dead Detective Mountain, Frank Burly, finds himself back in time and aboard the Titanic, which he makes a $100,000 dollar bet with the captain on:
Once the betting slip was safely in my pocket there was nothing for me to do but sit back and relax and wait for the boat to start sinking and the money to start rolling in. The only problem was I couldn't remember what exactly had caused the Titanic to sink in the history books. And the farther we steamed across the Atlantic without incident the antsier I got about it. The Titanic was supposed to run into something, I remembered, but what? Could we have already missed it somehow, whatever it was? Maybe my arrival here from the future without a ticket had altered history enough to cause us to miss it. So not only would I lose my bet, it would be all my fault, too. The more I thought about this possibility the antsier I got. With $100,000 at stake I couldn't afford to get this wrong.
I finally decided the best thing to do was to just start running the boat into everything. Then we'd be sure to hit it, whatever it was. Of course I'd have to clear my idea with the captain first. Fortunately, he and his employers were just as anxious to get this bet over with and start spending their winnings as I was, so after a quick phone call to them he said okay, sport, let's go.
At my direction, we began running the ship into reefs and rocks and every other navigational hazard we could find. We rammed into lighthouses, backed over fishing boats, and drove up on beaches and knocked over those lifeguard things.
Everything we hit was either severely damaged or destroyed, but the Titanic steamed away without a scratch every time. I knew it was waterproof, but now I was finding out that it was unbreakable too. The captain said that all of the parts that went into building it were just too big to break, that's why. How do you sink something like that? What a ship.
I insisted we keep trying, at least for awhile. For $100,000 I figured I should get at least 100 crashes, maybe 100,000. The captain didn't mind. He was supremely confident in his ship. Plus, he'd never had so much fun in his life. He said he wished he'd met me before.
But after we had wrecked a coastal town in France and one of our passengers had shot Teddy Roosevelt and we found ourselves hiding in fogbanks and telling all the passengers to keep their voices down for God's sake, as police boats patrolled slowly back and forth within 100 yards of us, and we could clearly see the cops looking at a wanted poster with a drawing of our boat on it showing me and the captain on the deck jumping with excitement, we realized that maybe we'd gone a little too far with all this.
2. How to Make the Best Coffee at Home by James Hoffman
I mean, why NOT make the best coffee at home? Shove it in those boomers’ faces, show ‘em that you aren’t poor because you get coffee outside the house, show ‘em that you’re poor because median housing prices are like half a million dollars, so fuck it, might as well feel good for 45 minutes with a nice beverage.
James Hoffman takes coffee, which can be a snooty world, and makes it super easy to understand. And he’s not an asshole! At all! He’s all about you finding what you like and being able to repeatedly make things that please you. He’s also careful to say what his personal tastes are, but that they might not be yours, and that’s cool.
3. The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker
Kind of a bunch of artsy exercises, “mindfulness,” if you will, but not bullshitty. Well, okay, some of it is hippie bullshit, but there are a lot of little games or things you can do IN YOUR OWN MIND that make boring times, like waiting in a line to get your house-denying coffee, more fun.
4. Cat+ Gamer by Wataru Nadatani
It’s just so fucking cute, you’ll explode. Everyone who has read this has exploded. I’m writing this from a hospital bed in the explosion ward, which hospitals all have now because this book is so goddamn adorable.
5. Uncanny: Origins of Fear by Junji Ito
Kind of a memoir, a bit “how-to,” Junji Ito is a master of horror, the Stephen King of Japanese manga, but, like, much scarier if you ask me, much more fucked up. This one is perfect for all you sickos out there, and more of you reading it will help me seem like less of a sicko, so let’s all read this, please.
6. The Hesit-est Heist Ever Heisted: A heist story of a heist: special editor’s edition by Me, Pete
Fuck you, I can put ONE book of my own on here. It’s 15 goddamn books, they’re ALL real, I deserve at least this much.
7. Mother Howl by Craig Clevenger
A very underappreciated author working in the sort of noirish space. I don’t know exactly how to categorize his books, which is why they don’t get written about enough. Awesome books that don’t fit super tidily in a genre are hard to describe in short spaces. But that doesn’t mean you won’t love it! It probably means you WILL love it.
8. The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson
This looks like a book, but the version you want is actually a box with 28 pamphlets inside. The pamphlets make up the story, and there is no specific order to them.
I’m an experimental fiction guy, admitted, but I have a low tolerance for bullshit gimmicks. This one comes off as a bullshit gimmick, but when you read it, it works the way it works to walk around a familiar town, to have memories come back to you in no particular order. It’s cool, it’s unique, and you could take a pamphlet or two to work with you, read them on a break, and ease the burden of carrying around a whole-ass book. You weakling.
9. 2120 by George Wylesol
Kind of a visual choose your own adventure where you, an IT guy, head into a building in a nondescript strip mall to do some tech work, and find yourself in a backrooms weirdness hellscape.
The book is super cool because it uses interesting tricks to make this a truly interactive experience. You have to take paths that get you a combination to a padlock, for example, that let you move into a new area. It’s a really great, new-to-me use of the format, I dig it.
10. Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon by Chuck Palahniuk
Of course my man Chucky P. is going to be on the list.
I’m not a huge armchair travel reader because I think books are a much suckier version of actually going to a place. BUT, what about places you cannot go to, not because you’re lazy or broke or just because leaving the house seems terrifying? I mean places you can’t visit because they no longer exist.
I’m not sure that the Portland of this book exists anymore. And the only way to visit it is to read this book.
Plus, it’s Chuck at his non-fiction best.
11. The Long Walk by Stephen King
Okay, okay, it’s a Richard Bachman, but fuck off with that noise.
This is the best Stephen King book. Other people have other favorites, and need I remind you that some people think black licorice is a delicious treat? Oh, you put salt on that dogshit? I bet that helps a ton.
You’ll want to read this one because the movie is coming out, and it won’t be as good. It just won’t. Have your first experience with the book instead. Do yourself that one kindness, that one favor.
12. God Jr. by Dennis Cooper
A father deals with the loss of his son by playing a video game save file his son had created. I’m 99% sure this is the only piece of literary fiction that describes Banjo-Kazooie, a crossover I neither expected nor realized I needed so badly.
13. Howard the Duck by Chip Zdarsky
Nobody writes superhero comics like Chipparoo, and this is just one of the absolute best. Mark my words: This will be a Marvel movie someday, and you’ll be in on the ground floor. We just need to get those guys off their asses and be like, “What if you just made some silly shit for once?” Then we reel ‘em in, and boom, the emotional punches in the story hit even harder.
14. But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, I think about it all the time, and we could all use a little bit of considering whether we might be wrong these days. Especially you. Me, I’m right, but YOU, woof, you’ve got a real Colorado Rockies batting average going.
15. The One-Hour MFA by Michael Kimball
Learn some basics of writing in 40 pages. As a time-in, knowledge-out investment, this can’t be beat. Plus, Michael Kimball rules. Get anything by him.