Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest stories from last week that you might have missed, wanted to forget, or were trying to remember.
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.
What are the Best-Selling Books by Black Authors?
Book sales data is hard to get (unless you pay a lot for it). The proxy data we get in the form of best-seller lists usually top out at 10-20 titles per. And as we have noted in our weekly tracking of what books make these lists, they are stunningly, consistently, and intractable very, very non-diverse. So what books beyond the tops of the charts are selling? And where do you start to see some different voices charting? I have said, I think both here and on various BR podcasts, that publishing has made great strides towards inclusivity. There is still much to be done. But publishing cannot control which books readers buy ultimately (trust me, they would if they could). The buy side of the buy-sell equation isn’t keeping up. Tools like this might help us see where some movement might be happening and give some books that are getting some traction a little extra juice.
And You Thought Fake AI-Book Lists Were Bad
I do not even understand how this is happening. The news this week about a fake AI-generated book list appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times reminded Lisa Ko that she has her own whacked out story of fake book coverage to share. Somehow, she has become the source of misattributed, mislabeled, and seemingly downright fabricated book blurbs. Hundreds of them. How is unclear. And so ripping out the source root and stem is impossible. A frustrating mini-Kafka story from the snowglobe world of book publishing.
Power Ranking the Books of 2005
Rebecca Schinsky and I went back twenty years to power-rank the 10 most influential, important, and memorable books from 2005. It was the year of Twilight and The Year of Magical Thinking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattooand so many others. Go here to hear what made our top 10 and why.
Five Supreme Court Justices Recuse Themselves from Publishing Case
The case itself seems like the quixotic flailing of a real crank, but the secondary event is pretty fascinating. Five supreme court justices recused themselves from hearing the plagiarism case because they are all five signed with the defendant, Penguin Random House. This means that with only four jurors remaining, the coure didn’t have a quorum, and so the finding of the lower court held, essentially saying that this is indeed the quixotic flailing of a real crank. I had not considered this higher-order consequence of PRH’s dominance: you will not get a case against them tried in the Supreme Court. Not ideal.
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Goes To…
A book I learned about today. No shade, but I hadn’t come across two books on the finalist list of five titles and the winner, Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, was one of them. That said, looking back at the list of winners of this award, which honors fiction by American permanent residents in a calendar year with a winner selected by three writer judges, this strikes me as one of the less predictable awards with a mix of big name/big publisher books and lesser known (or at least less buzzy) authors. The finalists vying for this year’s prize alongside the winning title were Ghostroots by Pemi Aguda, Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj (the other book I hadn’t heard of), James by Percival Everett, and Colored Television by Danzy Senna.
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