In May of last year, images of an insert from the Chicago Sun-Times with the title “Summer Reading List for 2025” began circulating on Bluesky. It was a capsule list of the sort that was ubiquitous online and in print: a cheery array of book covers accompanied by one- or two-sentence blurbs. There were fifteen books, all of them by well-known authors, mostly of literary fiction. Someone skimming this document might not realize that the majority of these titles did not exist; whoever had produced it, sans byline, had used AI, which had hallucinated ten of the fifteen books and their plots. Hopeful summer readers were thus introduced to books like The Rainmakers, wherein Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Percival Everett brings his talents to a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” Or maybe they would prefer Isabel Allende’s Tidewater Dreams, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism.”
Although designed to look like a winsome seasonal companion for one of Chicago’s last remaining papers, a closer read of the whole insert revealed a featureless slop document that could be stuck into any paper that had paid King Features for the privilege. All its tips for summer fun were written with the same kind of placid banality as the blurb for the chimeric Boiling Point by Rebecca Makkai: “a climate scientist [is] forced to reckon with her own family’s environmental impact when her teenage daughter becomes an eco-activist targeting her mother’s wealthy clients.” Soon, a journalist turned content creator named Marco Buscaglia ruefully told 404 Media that he had been the source of the fake book list and posted an apology for the whole snafu on his personal website, a tender text with a lengthy bio of his journalism career that emphasizes the very small amounts of money involved. It’s a reasonable defense from a culture worker who asked a machine to make a shitty book preview in a moment of—I am extrapolating—mind-numbing boredom and financial need.
Buscaglia’s insert, and his apology, struck a chord of mordant familiarity. I recognized the breathless nothingness of its descriptions because creating lists and blurbs like that used to be part of my job at The Millions, an online magazine that was once a vibrant place for books coverage and is now primarily a place for lists.
The Millions began in 2003 as the blog of a guy named C. Max Magee, an employee at Book Soup in Los Angeles who started the site to write about the books he was reading. Before long, he invited his fellow booksellers and friends to write about the books they were reading; eventually these turned into longer reviews and essays by an increasingly large number of contributors. In 2009, one of my friends sent my nascent WordPress blog about old books to Max, and he invited me on board. Max monetized The Millions from the beginning with ad space on Blogspot and through Amazon’s affiliate program, but the money was negligible. He shared the profits with contributors—I remember receiving sums like $11. I had never expected to earn money from writing, although I certainly wanted something from it.
I contributed to The Millions on and off for years, unaware that I was surfing the dwindling end of a wave, when a hobby with no promise of renumeration might still lead to paid work in media. I freely credit my writing career to the internet of the late aughts and early teens: I didn’t go to an MFA program or have any real understanding of newspapers or magazines, and the web allowed me to skip a number of arduous steps, from doggedly scouring mastheads to querying agents. I got a major print byline in 2015, the final domino in a sequence that began in 2010, when a prestige editor contacted me about my blog posts via, of all things, a Facebook message. (In a crude foreshadowing, I had to go to three stores before I could find a copy of the paper.) Writing for The Millions gave me the space to experiment for a reasonably sized and mostly supportive audience. It also introduced the inevitable formal constraints that would eventually push me to try my hand at fiction and, in 2018, realize a long submerged dream of publishing a novel.
Risk of Exposure
After I published my second novel in 2023, I found myself aboard a slow train to Boston to give a reading. I wanted to use the time to read something purely for enjoyment, and I brought The Flamethrowers, which I found virtuosic and finished with a sense of great satisfaction. I wondered why I hadn’t read it when it was published. Had it been too hyped, too popular? Would I have perhaps felt a naive sense of competition with a writer insanely out of my league? I vaguely recalled that there had been a critical skirmish about the novel when it came out in 2013; hunched over my phone on the rumbling train, I pieced it together a decade later. First, a famous poet had written a condescending review in The New York Review of Books. Then a writer and editor had indignantly responded in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Finally, a third writer summarized the dispute in The New Republic as a battle for influence between representatives of warring coastal cities (Tupac and Biggie were invoked).
There was something quaint about this decade-old publicity cycle. It wasn’t just the old-school gallantry of someone coming to a book’s defense in a 2,600-word essay that itself was deemed worthy of comment in a prestige magazine (or at least on its website), or the painfully dated analogizing of these white literary men’s exchange with the lives and violent deaths of two black icons. It was the fact that there had been any kind of extended “conversation” around a book at all. Granted, despite the limitless space of the internet, there had only ever been room for a handful of books to be treated as such, and maybe only enough room for one book by a woman—a white woman, naturally—that involved motorcycles and a world teeming with men. It was a strange feeling to look back at the scarcity of yesteryear and find abundance.
The Millions, meanwhile, had been sold to Publishers Weekly in 2019 for an amount that could have bought Max a nice midsize sedan.
But my own 2013 had seen abundance of a kind: publicists were sending me books, and editors were asking me to write about them online. One of these was Tao Lin’s novel Taipei, which I read at Max’s behest and excoriated in a review just as mannered and insufferable, in its own way, as the novel itself. The internet, hungry for invective, clicked on this more than anything I ever wrote again, as far as I know. One man published a scathing line-by-line takedown of the review on Tumblr. Another published an aloof, mildly disdainful notice on Gawker. Tao Lin himself pointed out, fairly, that I had quoted from the advanced copy, too green to understand how much the words in a galley could change. I read these texts—which I pictured as flying westward from New York, the site of all culturally relevant opinion as well as the affectless bacchanals of the novel I had just shat on—at the desk of my day job formatting architectural proposals in San Francisco. I took my very first smart phone out to my lunch break and scrolled through Twitter reactions while smoking cigarettes behind a dry cleaner, my stomach in a knot. It was all happening.
Recalling this era on an Amtrak in 2023 felt like contemplating the cave paintings of Lascaux. The person who wrote the wounding Tumblr post now worked at The New Yorker; we cordially followed each other on Twitter, which Elon Musk had bought and was swiftly turning into a stagnant Nazi pond. Tumblr had been acquired by Yahoo, which was acquired by Verizon, which sold Tumblr to Automattic, which entered talks to sell its users’ data to Midjourney and OpenAI. Gawker, forced into bankruptcy by Peter Thiel as punishment for publishing Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, had shuttered after its bargain-basement acquisition by millionaire Bryan Goldberg; in a few months, the Gawker writer who had written about my review would publish a stunning cover story in New York about his chronic illness and the collapse of the media industry. Tao Lin had weathered both my review and an abuse allegation, moved on to publish other well-received books, and cured himself, he reported, of autism.
The Millions, meanwhile, had been sold to Publishers Weekly in 2019 for an amount that could have bought Max a nice midsize sedan. It continued publishing reviews, essays, and interviews on a shaky financial model that relied on not paying the vast majority of guest contributors—something that had felt fine when I started out at the site but began to rankle when I became the site’s editor, a part-time gig I held from 2016, when I quit my office job to finish my first novel, to 2018, when the novel was published. Even if my own career was proof that exposure could be a viable path to actual money, someone was making some money off that exposure, or at least they could be.
The site was now big enough, though, and recognizably part of a media ecosystem that its management could no longer be anyone’s labor of love. The money on offer to pay me, a web editor, a handful of staff writers, and the web developers primarily came from the book previews section—exactly the kind of thing that snagged up Mr. Buscaglia and his imaginary hot summer books last spring.
Clicks and Stones
Max had published the first book preview in 2005, when it will still just his blog. To my mind, Max has always been the evil genius who invented the concept, but his original list of fifteen linked to four newspaper previews, and trade publications had been doing lists long before The Millions. As Max put it, “There was always a streak of bookstore clerk helpfulness reimagined as service journalism to The Millions. I understood from working at a bookstore that even people who love to read can have a hard time figuring out what to read next and don’t always know if an author they like has a new book coming out.” But his little checklist eventually attained the status of a publishing event. “The Millions Most Anticipated Great Annual Book Preview” became the Great Winter and Summer book previews, which then became monthly previews. These kinds of lists soon proliferated at legacy institutions—the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker—often with almost identical framing.
Publicists began to pitch their books specifically for the preview. Site contributors were asked to suggest titles (“Sophomore Literary Fiction”) and contribute capsules (“A thrilling new arrival from the genius who brought you Debut Literary Fiction”). Over the years, the lists began to balloon, fueled by anxious and necessary conversations about gatekeeping and representation. By the time I came on as the editor in 2016, the previews were creeping up toward a hundred titles. Max, who still owned the site when I was its editor, encouraged me to pare the list down and exert some curatorial influence, but I was constitutionally incapable. First of all, five minutes with the sausage-making of list culture was sufficient to understand how arbitrary the process really was. Secondly, as a new novelist myself, I felt the pain of being excluded. Moreover, the exclusivity denoted by curation was at odds with the revenue possibilities presented by more affiliate links, as the book titles in these Millions previews were embedded with Amazon affiliate links (there was also an option for Indiebound and, later, Powell’s Books and Bookshop). But those affiliate programs could never compete with the Amazon revenue model: sure, the site would get a few cents if someone bought a book from a link, but the real money was made when someone clicked on a book, then went on to buy a vacuum cleaner or an inflatable hot tub.
When you find yourself writing lists in lieu of real criticism, a nihilistic moment will come in which you believe that you hate books.
Even after I burned out and stopped editing the site in 2018, I kept coming back to help with the preview section, because I could earn $500 for doing so. It was just that lucrative. (For context, I had gotten $1,000 a month to edit the whole site; again, this was no one’s full-time job.) Max again: “The financial and cultural motives ended up selecting for longer and longer lists, which always felt a little silly to me because all I was really trying to do was replicate the ‘coming soon’ poster at the local library.” The lists joined an arms race that endures today. LitHub, which became The Millions’ primary peer and main competitor in the book content mines, had 291 books on their first-half-of-2025 list. The capsules in these gargantuan lists are written by a handful of people who are, judging by my experience, scraping the thesaurus and clawing out their eyes by the end of their allotted blurbs. I began to feel that I was helping make these lists purely so that I could pay myself to make more lists and retired from the whole sordid racket in 2022.
Unlike the Chicago Sun-Times Summer Reading List, the books in The Millions previews are real. But the capsules are almost as fanciful, knitted together from whatever publishers’ copy is available, blurbs or prizes garnered by the author’s previous books, and random, desperate editorializing (“Sounds incredible!”). “Anticipated” is a stretch, because you can’t technically anticipate a book you haven’t read by an author you haven’t heard of. As Christian Lorentzen put it in his 2019 essay on the listicle state of modern books coverage, they “blight the landscape with superlatives that are hard to believe, especially, as is inevitable, when they aren’t drawn from the work of critics but compiled by poorly paid writers who haven’t read the books they’re recommending, a standard practice in preview lists.” The labor involved in making these lists was as close to the opposite of a transcendent reading experience as a disillusioned culture worker could get.
When it was my job to make the first draft of a list, I read publishers’ catalogues and saved social media posts, but mostly I spent a lot of time on a site called Fiction Database, which held practically every book that would be published in a given year and required interacting with an indescribably shitty interface to unearth them. When a critic friend asked how I found forthcoming books beyond publicists, I sent her an email with seven annotated screenshots and a tortured précis on the way Fiction Database used both “General Fiction” and “Literary” as a category or how its filter tool couldn’t be trusted. The site did not differentiate between age ranges, as I recall, so you had to comb through tiny thumbnails of children’s books and Christian romance novels to find fiction suitable for The Millions’ audience. Occasionally a savvy list-writer could scoop the publicist-coordinated reveals of famous authors’ new books by finding, hidden between the rows of every individual book with a new ISBN, a placeholder entry for the likes of Zadie Smith or Marilynne Robinson. Finding one of these was like finding a huge diamond in that giant dirt pit in Arkansas.
List culture’s ravenous maw did not limit itself to the blogs. The New York Times Book Review had a history of ripping off the brave scriveners of “Bookternet.” Under Pamela Paul’s tenure, the NYTBR had a covert list feature called “Year in Reading” where they asked notable guest writers to weigh in on their favorite reads, a ringer for The Millions’ “Year in Reading” series, which had run for roughly a decade before. (In a marvelous girlboss-gaslight-gatekeep response to Max’s politely indignant email on the subject, Pamela Paul denied any impropriety.) But, to give credit where it is due, the NYTBR has done a much better job bringing the veneer of curation to bear while still cramming their site full of lists. Their Summer 2025 list had only thirty-one books, but then there’s “22 Books Coming in August,” “7 New Books We Love This Week,” or “18 Great Road Trip Books That Aren’t On the Road.” Wow! And that’s before we get to the coveted “100 Notable Books” list that causes such anxiety among writers as December approaches. Sometimes the front page of the NYTBR is so festooned with numbers, it looks like a sudoku.
All of this is to say I understand where Marco Buscaglia was coming from. What he did was an inevitable consequence of the economy of clicks to which our media consumption has been reduced. When you find yourself writing lists in lieu of real criticism, a nihilistic moment will come in which you believe that you hate books, that when you see the cover of a book and believe you have as good as read it because you recognize it has entered the culture via the shitty conveyor belt that your labor has helped construct. All books—including your own—might as well be the ravings of a Silicon demon, fattened on our collective preferences, biases, and grammatical errors, and watered by aquifers sucked up from the literal ground while a new Dust Bowl forms above. That’s when it is time to exit your list job.
Combing through an obstinate, unaesthetic, and user-unfriendly website like Fiction Database for hidden gems is exactly the kind of project AI should be good at. That’s not an endorsement. I want to say a machine can’t know what is good or what other people will like, but the hurtful truth is that it probably sort of could, thanks to the recommendation engine we’ve spent the last twenty years constructing while being fed to ourselves. AI, for now, still gets a lot wrong, but it can sound right. Have you read accounts of the terrifyingly glib LLM who spits out slick analyses of essays it will later confess not to have read, apologizing like a problematic roommate confronted about dirty dishes? Machines are as pitiful as we are but, unlike us, they can’t feel shame. We can be grateful, I guess, that at least they confess when they lie. For now.
Surplus and Minus
I have been thrown off kilter by the speed with which AI has infiltrated everything. I knew it was in use—I pay $20 for an app that identifies plants—just like I assumed the customer service people I chat with are often bots or that someone runs my X-rays through a little computer guy before a real guy looks at it. But in the last few months—weeks even—I have received a series of revelations: one friend told me she used ChatGPT to write a bedtime story for her kid; writers tell me they are feeding their own chapters to AI for help organizing; and my husband uses it to summarize meeting notes. They make me mad at all these people I love. I think of the meme that says “All Robots & Computers Must Shut The Hell Up . . . You Have No Right To Speak In My Holy Tongue.” One of the reasons I think I became a novelist is that I ambiently notice a lot of things but need a lot of time to put the pieces together—perhaps like most human beings.
The Millions, last I checked, hasn’t published an essay or review since 2024. The majority of things that appeared on the site last year were the book previews and Year in Reading. I don’t want to make the aging person’s assumption that the cultural welter that produced my cohort cannot reinvent itself. I know there is a huge hive of reading and other learning on what we still call the internet. People make videos and talk about books, and they have newsletters, and the newsletters talk to each other. My second book was—god forgive me—published by the imprint of a podcast. Bright young things are trading ideas and inventing new languages on platforms I don’t understand, and they have a sense of humor that brings me genuine joy when I stumble across it. More importantly, I have seen people use the internet and social media to respond to the material needs of our planet in ways that move me beyond words and that are worth ten thousand lost book blogs. The problem is that the people who own these tools want to keep us from using their inventions in joyful and anarchic ways. In the most profound and basic sense, the engineers of our current situation, cultural and otherwise, are our enemies. They want to make money from us, not build a better world. They take the things we make and use them to replace the makers.
We are still talking to each other across time and space. But it’s not the fake constructs they build out of our teeth and hair, or the clippings and crumbs we have left all over the web for the last thirty years. It’s the people talking. It’s us. So, you know the drill. Don’t talk to Chat. Mourn the dead blogs. Fight like hell for the living.