The year is almost over. I don’t think I could put together a halfway compelling listicle, so instead here are a couple of reflections on the past twelve months in reading.
I Read Don Juan
Despite being a lifelong reader, and a reader of literary fiction in its many forms and flavors, I have never been a serious poetry reader. I barely even bothered to glance at the poems in the New Yorker, and I assumed everyone else ignored them as well. When I did actually read one, it only fed my ungenerous suspicions about poetry. But earlier this year I read Lord Byron’s mock heroic epic, Don Juan. For those who do not know it is a retelling of the Spanish libertine, inverted to satiric effect, so that the hero is the hapless victim of circumstance and more experienced women. It is also highly biographical, topical, and sensational. It has war, cannibalism, Orientalism, and a ghost. It consists of 17 Cantos and written in stanzas adhering to an impressive regular rhyming scheme. It is clear Byron meant to keep on writing it as long as he lived, but he dies young, and the 17th Canto is left unfinished, the story left on a cliffhanger.
My reading of Don Juan was slow, conducted in the dark, on my phone, usually while waiting for my child to fall asleep. But I did have some help. Whenever I got stuck, which was frequently, I copied the stanza in question into the Claude app, and asked the AI to give me a line by line commentary on the poem, explaining the various references. The output was invariably enlightening. I was even able to get Claude to explain the convoluted grammar in certain passages when subject, object, and verb became tricky to identify. In rather tiresome fashion, it would conclude each essay by informing me that the stanza was a fine example of the satiric form that Byron was famous for. It was tiresome, but the more I read, the more I began to appreciate how each stanza was structured with a satiric punch at the end.
So now I am a poetry guy, I guess. Picking up something like Paradise Lost seems like a much less daunting task with an impressively well read LLM ready to offer commentary. I even read the occasional New Yorker poem now. I recently found some unintended humor in the following lines of Last Time By Nick Laird.
I dropped Turk at the station and back home
stacked the shed for a bit, and was up the ladder
cutting back the multiform rose when the radioannounced we were, now, at war. So I got a beer
from the fridge and brought Andy’s new translations
of Bashō to the hammock.
It is a poem in the vein of Ecclesiates, about commencement of the War in Ukraine. You can date the poem events of the poem pretty easily due to Laird buzzmarketing a friend’s new translation of Bashō.
Yes. Artificial Intelligence
Here is a stanza from Don Juan that I particularly liked:
‘Where is the world?’ cries Young, at eighty—‘Where
The world in which a man was born? ‘Alas!
Where is the world of eight years past? ’Twas there—
I look for it—’tis gone, a globe of glass!
Crack’d, shiver’d, vanish’d, scarcely gazed on, ere
A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.
Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings,
And dandies, all are gone on the wind’s wings.
The stanza is a reflection on the passing of time and how increasingly transient the given state of affairs begins to look as one regime gives way to another. (Ask an LLM to give a little commentary if you struggle to parse it.) I found it particularly resonant not only as political winds change, but as it has been becoming clear that generative AI was changing society. I remember what the internet used to be like as a teenager, and then when Youtube and Facebook arrived. I can see what it is like now. There is much to dislike about the effects, and soon we will be talking about the pre and post-slop eras. The slop is real, and so is the resentment. You can find it in the opinion pages and in the comment sections. AI is insunuating itself into our way of life. The Venture Capitalists funding it are forcing it on us. Or forcing it down our throats, even. For every hype man there are also the haters. The hype men imagined a future that was delusional, and the haters who are in a state of principled denial. It isn’t just that AI might not reach AGI, might not solve all our problems, might not match the sci-fi inspired visions of tomorrow that have been guiding the principal architects of these companies. It it not simply that AI might have bad consequences. To the true haters generative AI is a scam and a fraud and it doesn’t work and it is a stochastic parrot and a theft machine and that it is also has the power to drive our children stupid and insane. That the AI bubble is going to burst, and when it does, then everything might just go back to the way it was before. The real issue is that AI does actually work very well in many respects, and might only improve.
There has been a great deal of commentary about generative AI, and I can’t say I’ve been impressed by much of it. A lot of it seems reactionary and lazy. But I think the following pieces are very good:
Somers has been on the AI beat for a while, and has a good grasp of the technology, and you can read other pieces he has written in the New Yorker. His piece is good because it appreciates that we now have an utterly unprecedented insight into how the human mind works. It may far from complete, and in certain respects it may be misleading, but nothing we had before was even remotely close to this kind of progress.
My general verdict on LLMS is that they are a fantastically powerful and useful tool that I should be allowed to use, obviously. But I’m not so sure about everyone else. And this really is one of the fundamental problems.
I Started A Book Club
In late 2024 I started a book club, and some way into 2025 we really got into the swing of it. I had a list of rules to guide what we would read:
- Recently published novels.
- Literary fiction, as it is broad construed.
- Not too long; below 300 pages, ideally.
- No books about writers and writing.
- When we discuss the book, we hold off a final thumbs up/down until the end of the discussion.
I initially placed a restriction on translation, mostly because I felt that novels written in the Anglosphere, though we ended up including quite a lot of translated fiction.
These were good rules, in that they had the desired effect. Within what is considered literary fiction there is a wide variety of material. Because the books are recent releases, their reputations haven’t been solidified. There certainly have been disappointing books, even among those picked out from prize shortlists, but because they have not been overlong, few of them overstayed their welcome. And because they are short, I don’t think we’ve has a single instance of anyone having half read the books. Book selection is fun, as far as I’m concerned, and not particularly difficult. Even if you were totally clueless about the literary scene, the major prizes have shortlists that provide more than enough candidates.
So far we have done the following:
Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner
Orbital - Samantha Harvey
Glorious Exploits - Ferdia Lennon
James - Percival Everett
Blue Light Hours - Bruna Lobato
Let Us Descend - Jesmyn Ward
Rejection - Tony Tulathimutte
The Vanishing World - Sayaka Murata
Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
Perspective(s) - Laurent Binet
Perfection - Vincenzo Latronico
Audition - Katie Kitamura
Universatily - Katie Brown
The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong