Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don’t Exist
LLMs make mistakes that no human would. And they aren’t mistakes even in a traditional sense, but incorrect calculations about the probability of words going in order. So whoever ran a to ChatGPT or whatever to “write” a post for the Chicago Sun-Times called “The Best Summer Reading List for 2025” made at least two mistakes. First, do not have LLMs do your work for you. Research yes. Spell check and grammar, sure. But trust it to know what books are real and which are just somehow figured to be pretty likely to exist even when they don’t? No. This is embarrassing for the writer and a real blow to the paper’s credibility. Which is not to say this isn’t probably (certainly really) happening all over the place. But if you are not going to do human work, then you shouldn’t be read by other humans.
Read With Jenna Jr 2025
I didn’t realize that Jenna Bush-Hager had been releasing a summer reading list for kids for the past few years. This is way out of my area of expertise, but at first glance seems pretty interesting with a range of choices for several age groups. Apparently, she “hand-picks” these selections, and I would be quite interested to know more about that process. I am not inclined to disbelieve the Obamas and the Reeses of the world in their reading, nerds walk among us after all, but how the titles get put on these lists and picked for each month is still more mysterious than it need be.
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The “Hey I Just Might” Books of May
I haven ‘t been on Today in Books duty for a couple of weeks, but want to link to this episode of First Edition where I walked through a whole bunch of May new releases that I found interesting before the month is out. The listener response was really good. Turns out people listening to book podcasts like hearing about books. I think I am on to something here.