In case you missed literary drama among the many other far graver, existential dramas and traumas of yesterday the TLDR is that The Chicago Sun Times and at least one edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer (SHAME) published a Summer 2025 reading list, featuring all the hot new releases. EXCEPT, the list was later revealed to have been written by AI, which folks figured out when it became clear that most of the books did not, and would never, exist--they were made up robot hallucinations.

You may have already read my initial AI rant, about how it makes no sense to task plagiarism robots with creative work, and my supplementary rant about how the utter bullshit of NaNoWriMo and others pretending generative AI is some of disability solidarity movement.

And now, here is my short third rant about how it makes no sense to task plagiarism robots with creative work like writing in general, particularly opinion writing, in which the recommender is ideally supposed to have read the books and had feelings about them, neither of which AI can do. Or, as some folks have pointed out on Bluesky, if you're going to phone in the task of a summer reading roundup, you could just cut and paste the publisher's copy, and you don't even have to drain several lakes to do it!

ANYway, here are my recommendations for a few books out this summer. They're real! I know because I've read them!