The Booktender

The Booktender

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The Booktender
The Booktender
Who's hallucinating now?
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Who's hallucinating now?

Scapegoats, shit jobs, and the summer reading list that wasn't

May 24, 2025
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If you’re new to The Booktender thanks to recommendations from the kind people behind

Woman of Letters
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Beyond Bloomsbury
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Andrea Bartz: Get It Write
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The Craft Lab for Writers
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Reads With Alicia
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A reading life
etc, welcome! Special thanks to new paid subscribers Louise, Stephen, and Gitanjali ❤️. I dispatch a monthly, human-made, themed reading list including new and backlist books, plus reviews that bring the books into conversation with each other on a weekly-ish basis. I rarely share a take like today’s but I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Sharing this post or leaving a comment much appreciated!

By now you’ve probably seen the A1 steak sauce of a summer reading list published in a special section called “Heat Index,” distributed by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Of the 15 books by prominent authors listed, only 5 of them were real. It was published without a byline but the freelancer responsible for it, Marco Buscaglia, admits he used ChatGPT or Claude to prompt the content and didn’t check the output for accuracy. 

Like the large language model machine he used to cut…

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