What I've Been Reading

After taking a few weeks off in June, I found that I was simply…not reading the various articles and essays about publishing that I come across daily, and often writing about here. I think AI has been the tipping point—the barrage of issues, complications, prophesies, histories, and outrage have overwhelmed me. I joked that I have decided to stop having opinions, and this one simple trick relaxed me more than anything else I’ve tried. Who needs massage when you can simply not know or care?

I am not constitutionally capable nor truly apathetic enough to continue this opinion-strike for long. And it’s not just not the having of opinions; it’s also deciding not to express them that calms me.

So I’m reading again.

Below you won’t find anything about AI companies buying up rare books to rip apart and scan (it’s unlikely these books are, indeed, rare, or even scarce, and longtime readers of this newsletter are well aware that print fetishism has never been my thing. It’s extremely likely every text referred to in those pieces can be easily found online or in print. Do you know how hard it is to get rid of books no one wants? Libraries, booksellers, publishers, and dealers all regularly throw out or pulp scads and scads and scads of books. The 8,921,211st copy of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us doesn’t need to be preserved. Not that AI companies are heroes of course, just that it’s too easy to rile people up over non-issues. Anyway, I’m really enjoying the conversation about all this amongst rare book dealers on the Exlibris listerv.)

Publishing Related

You also won’t find anything about the latest “this novel used AI” scandals, including this truly head scratching one—there are plenty of other people writing about those topics. . But if you do want to follow these topics calmly, regularly, and with smart, measured takes, subscribe to Jane Friedman’s The Bottom Line. ChatGPTIsEatingtheWorld is also a good place to keep updated on the latest, as is the Authors Alliance.

• I haven’t read Laura B. McGrath’s Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction yet (see intro to this newsletter) but I really enjoyed this very smart review of it by Elias Altman in Bookforum. I can’t agree or disagree with his take on McGrath’s book, obviously, but I appreciate what he writes about literary history in the review, as well as his thoughts about agenting, and recents changes to it. Also, he’s a great writer.
  

• “Authorship After The Internet” is a great review from Julianne Werlin of Aarthi Vadde’s We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature, another book I haven’t yet, but will, read.

• Back when Belt was first starting, Naomi Huffman, then working for now-defunct Chicago press Curbside Splendor, was a font of advice, suggestions, and help. I’m so thrilled to see what she’s now up to at Hagfish. I think this inventive model, combining a press, agency, editorial services, and membership, is the smartest way to organize a non-W2 life in books these days. (And if you are looking to hire an editor, I strongly recommend talking to them.)
  

• Summer of Ludd is cool; seems very Situationlist to me. I’m not the biggest fan of the Luddite revival per se though (the Luddites were not very successful? or fun?), so I really liked this piece in Flaming Hydra by Nathan Schneider: Beyond Luddism.
  

• How AI Will Shape Public Opinion by Dan Williams. Could be!
  

• This piece in Tech Policy by Eryk Salvaggio about the Anthropic settlement and future possible lawsuits taught me, a reader of many things about that settlement, some new things.
  

For Fun

• I read a bunch of Tana French when she first started publishing, and then stopped because I felt they were too dense and too long; friends suggested I try again with her Cal Hopper series and I read one and half before deciding that true, they are less dense, but her books are still too long. Alas!
  

• Anita Brookner’s Look At me, which I thought fantastic and devastating in exactly the right ways.
  

• Did I tell you about Transit of Venus already? My god what a novel.
  

• I read the first two volumes of Anthony Powells Dance to the Music of Time and as the months go by I’ll read the remaining 10.
  

• A novel by Dorothy Canfield Fisher that absolutely blew me away that we will be reissuing as part of Belt Revivals next year (title to be revealed once you can pre-order ;)
  

• Manuscripts and proposals, including the two screenshot deals here, yay.
  

  

  

Have you read something I should read? Let us all know in the comments.

I’ll be teaching a one week proposal course in November, and you can support my reading habit (and help me pay to subscribe to the outlets above) by becoming a paid subscriber. Research says supporting others improves mental health, perhaps as much as not having opinions!