BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS ACHIEVE THEIR ULTIMATE FORM
By the algorithm for the algorithm
LONDON—It comes as little surprise that the software currently known as “artificial intelligence” has been put to use in the cobbling of book recommendations lists, as of this weekend including a summer reading list printed in the Chicago Sun-Times as well as other newspapers. I have already written at length about the general worthlessness of these lists, which when composed in advance of a publishing season are generally cribbed from publishing catalogs by people who haven’t and will never read the books being listed. Now we have such lists in their ultimate form: a list written by nobody for readers who don’t care consisting mostly of books that do not and will never exist, plus Ian McEwan’s Atonement (I would have gone with Sweet Tooth but at least it wasn’t Nutshell), Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman, and a Ray Bradbury book that isn’t even science fiction.
Imagine a couple—call them Madison and Brendan—who are devoted readers of the Sun-Times this past Sunday going straight from their breakfast nook to the nearest independent bookshop or, so be it, Barnes & Noble and looking for The Rainmakers by Percival Everett, Boiling Point by Rebecca Makkai, or The Longest Day by Rumaan Alam. Not only are the books not on the shelves, but they can’t even be pre-ordered. Madison and Brandon will have to settle for bringing Atonement or Call Me by Your Name to the beach with them (where do people from Chicago go to the beach? Somewhere in Michigan or Wisconsin? [A reader writes: “People in Chicago go to the beach in Chicago, next to the expressway. You have to go through a tunnel or cross a bridge to get to the sand, depending on where you’re entering from”]), which is a shame because they’ve already both read the books and seen the movies, or else Ray Bradbury, whom they remember fondly from high school, something about paper lighting on fire. Boo hoo! The Sun-Times not only let Madison and Brandon down it let down all the authors who have new books coming out this summer that are deserving beach reads.
On the other hand, there is something virtuosic about these little previews of nonexistent books. The computer has really figured out that what readers really want are books from our most lauded and lately even commercial authors that tap into their anxieties about climate change. And not only about climate change but about AI itself. How meta! I’m sure it would be easy to figure out the sources of all these made-up books (Hurricane Season, for example, is an actual title by Fernanda Melchor not Brit Bennett; Percival Everett has indeed written westerns; and so on), but who cares? It’s the little formulas like “another atmospheric novel that blends science with coming-of-age narrative” or “long-suppressed tensions emerge alongside unexpected reconciliations” or “how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets” or “continues to resonate with its exploration of desire and identity” or “readers who enjoy emotional complexity with their beach reading” (who among us is not such a reader?) that show that the computer has really mastered the art of the summer books preview. Why bother making an actual person write this stuff, as I have been made to do at a couple of my old jobs (once I was even asked to write a column predicting the reviews that would be received by books nobody besides their authors and editors had read yet; I said I preferred to read the books and write the reviews myself and I was out of a job a few weeks later, perhaps coincidentally), stuff that is the ghost of publicity for a culture that used to know how to make stars and makes stars no longer. Too bad that most of the best writers are already dead!