More Than Words, by John Warner: Pushing Back Against Our AI Overlords

Like Amazon, avocados, and Colleen Hoover novels, my reflexive reaction to any conversation about generative AI is to wince and turn away. I don't teach writing myself, but I work for a nonprofit literary arts organization whose whole mission is to teach writing (StoryStudio, shout out!), and for that reason I'm terrified of generative AI. I'm also angry at tech bros like Sam Altman who used copyrighted material to train his large language model, ChatGPT. And I'm worried AI is a shortcut for so many youths these days who don't seem to need too much convincing to take shortcuts (old man yells at cloud!).

Because it's so distasteful, I've largely avoided going much deeper than surface-level knowledge about generative AI. The extent of my experience with ChatGPT is the one time I asked it to give me a list of 1990s grunge band names. What it gave me was so hilariously bad (Mudstain! Soggy Flannel! Gravel Gaze!), I've never been back. AI may be stupid, but it's still ubiquitous, and so still very concerning.

So John Warner's new book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI is a soothing balm; a book that will help demystify AI and gently talk you off the ledge. If you're a Chicago book person, you're probably familiar with Warner. He writes as the Biblioracle in the Sunday Chicago Tribune (as books coverage has dwindled, his column remains a stalwart). He also writes about books and writing in a terrific companion Substack titled The Biblioracle Recommends.

More Than Words truly meets the moment in terms of explaining what AI is, what it is not, and most importantly, how writing can and will still thrive in the age of AI. 

Warner writes: "Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we're trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing."

There is a lot to love in this book, but that quote to me is the central takeaway. Though what ChatGPT does *resembles* writing, of course, what ChatGPT does IS NOT writing. What ChatGPT does is placing tokens in syntactically correct order. Writing requires thought. And more thought. And pain. And then some more thought. Despite its name, artificial intelligence does not think. So artificial intelligence does not write. 

Further, what ChatGPT does is DEFINITELY not creating art. Art requires feeling. And obviously, AI has none. "What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience," Warner writes. "When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligence to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don't seem too intelligent." 

How to teach writing in the age of AI, how to pushback (resist?!) against the most nefarious uses of AI, and maybe even some positive use cases for AI (if we're careful) related to writing are all discussed in this book, as well. 

I needed this book badly and I can't recommend it more highly to you if you care about books and writing, as well. 

Halfway Through the Knausgaard-verse

Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard brings with it a heightened level of nose-crinkling cringe when I tell some of my much younger colleagues what I'm reading. I find it hilarious, but never has my book taste been more sus to them than when I tell them I'm reading an old white Norwegian dude whose books have no plot. 

Last week, after I finished the third book in the six-volume My Struggle series, I found a way to put these terrific books in their terms: These books are to middle-aged (sometimes pretentious) white dudes what Ali Hazelwood and Emily Henry are to them: Pure reading enjoyment! You don't have to completely understand it. It is what it is. And the heart wants what the heart wants. They're not tempted to rush out and buy copies of Knausgaard's books, but at least they get it a little bit now. 

And but so, I started this 3,600-page series with a whole bunch of  questions in mind: What makes these books so popular? Why are writers from Zadie Smith to Jonathan Lethem besotted with these novels? How do readers pull themselves through these long books with no ostensible plot? What is so "compulsively readable" (as many of the blurbs breathlessly point out), exactly, about an irascible middle-aged Norwegian writer telling us about his kid's birthday party or traveling to see his grandparents or so much else that's so mundane any writing teacher would tell the writer to cut it?

I think part of the answer to all these questions is that against all odds, Knausgaard is relatable. He struggles with every day life. He struggles with trying to be a good person when it's so much easier not to be. He struggles simply being a person in the world populated with other people with whom he has trouble connecting, getting along with, or even tolerating. 

You can still like people and like these books, but having at least a streak of curmudgeon in you may enhance your enjoyment of these books. Despite my outward sunny disposition and consistent optimism (LOL), you may be surprised to learn that sometimes People (not individual persons, but People collectively) get under my skin. 

And that brings me to Philip Roth, perhaps the most famous curmudgeonly writer of them all. One thing that drew me to these books is how much I love Philip Roth's novels. Roth's writing is as detailed, insightful, and profound as anything I've ever read. Roth and Knausgaard are similar this way. Even when nothing is happening, and nothing is happening frequently in Knausgaard, reading them is still a delight. 

But to reiterate, don't read Knausgaard if you need plot. There ain't none. Each book has an overarching theme (death, love, boyhood) and each book includes frequent long scenes that feel like plot (the 50-plus-page birthday party that kicks off the second book, for instance), but the only real overarching action is Knausgaard continuously ramming his skull into the brick wall of life.

These aren't books I read 100 pages at a time. I dip in and out slowly and read until I get tired. I think that's the only way. But yes, here at the halfway point of the Knausgaard-verse, I'm encouraged and excited to keep going. Who's with me? 😅

My Friends, by Hisham Matar: On the Loneliness of Exile

Hisham Matar's 2024 National Book Award-finalist novel My Friends is about making your way in the world when you can't go home again. It's about the loneliness of exile, the importance of friendship, and the horrors of authoritarianism.

Imagine your life being on pause for more than 25 years. You exist in limbo, away from your country, apart from your family, even having to lie to them, knowing your infrequent correspondence and even more infrequent conversations are monitored. Such is the fate of our narrator, Khaled, a Libyan national who arrives in Edinburgh in 1984 on a university scholarship. Young and idealistic, but also naive, Khaled becomes swept up in political currents much stronger than his ability to deal with him.

He rues the day he didn't listen more closely to his university friend, who told him when he arrived in Edinburgh: "I have resigned myself to the fact that I live in a world of unreasonable men and the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is, best we can, avoid their schemes."

So for reasons I won't spoil, Khaled becomes stuck in the UK. He can't return home because if he does, he likely won't be allowed to leave Libya again. Being trapped in an authoritarian state, though, might be the best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, he'd be murdered by the regime, as so many before him had.

So he stays in London, building a life with his friend, Mustafa, and later, a writer named Hosam Zawa, who'd been one of the inspirations for him to go to university and study literature in the first place.

When the revolution breaks out in the spring of 2011, each of these men must again weigh his priorities. Each man must take an accounting of his courage. 

The pace of this novel is deliberate and contemplative, and the tone is sober and earnest. The story is told in 108 short chapters, which gives the effect of pulling you along a little more quickly than you might read otherwise. But to me this still felt a little like homework. Yes, it's a VERY GOOD NOVEL. The reviews are universally exceptional and it's won tons of literary awards. But it felt more like something I *should* be reading, like a long New Yorker expose, than something I'd read strictly for pleasure. That said, I'm still really glad I read it. It's a stunning piece of literary fiction, and provides fascinating context and a new perspective on events on which I'd only known a little about.  

Shelf Lives, Vol. 1: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today I'm excited to introduce a new feature at the New Dork Review of Books: Shelf Lives.

Here's the story behind Shelf Lives: My bookshelf is a trip into my past. Every book there has a story about how I came to it, when/where I bought/read it, and what was going on in my life at the time I bought/read it. Many, probably most, of these stories are pretty mundane. Some are not, and these are the stories I want to tell. Why does a book make me feel a certain kind of way when I catch a glimpse of it sitting on my shelf? What specific memories does it evoke? What connections does my brain immediately begin making to music, food, time/place, and other books? 

Over the years, I've had to purge hundreds of books from my shelves to avoid being buried, so the ones that remain are truly special. Getting older makes you nostalgic, and so I decided I wanted to spend a post or two each month writing about some of the stories behind my most beloved books. It's entirely possible these stories are only interesting to me. But I do hope you enjoy them too. I also hope these stories give you occasion to think about the stories behind your own most-loved books.

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Volume 1: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's Labor Day weekend, 2013, and my then-fiancée-now-wife's mother is in town to help her shop for wedding dresses. So I decide to make myself scarce and head out on an epic road trip. My plan is to drive around the Midwest to new-to-me bookstores, including Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, and Subterranean Books and Left Bank Books in St. Louis, among others. 

I wrote a blow-by-blow account of this pretty epic adventure here. (Amazingly, the links to the photos on Flickr still work! Also, I still have the trusty blue Honda Civic. 😅) Writing about that trip was nearly as much as the trip itself. Rereading that post now makes me laugh. 

So of course I came back from that trip with a huge stack of new books. But of all the books I bought on that trip, by far the most enduring, most important, and my favorite is Adichie's Americanah. I've written a lot about how much I love this book (here is my original raving review), and I've been thinking about it a lot lately as I'm about to read her new novel, Dream Count (out March 4) -- her first novel since Americanah. 

Americanah is such a terrific examination of American foibles (especially related to race) and so it remains a perfect match in my mind for that road trip, in which I also discovered my share of Americana and American foibles -- the dude who draped his jeans and underwear over the bed of his truck (presumably to dry after he'd washed them in his room? I hope?) in the parking lot of a motel, for instance. 

Even though I didn't actually read the novel until two months after this road trip, Americanah and that adventure are inextricably linked in my mind. This was also the first time I'd read Adichie, and I've since read every word she's written -- easily one of my top 5 favorite writers.

Because I loved the book so much, and think about it often, the book also gives me an excuse to think back fondly on that trip. Maybe it's time to do that again. I never re-read books, but maybe it's time to give Americanah another look, too. 

Are You Ready to Rock?! Here Are 6 Amazing Music Novels

There is no subgenre of novel I love more than books about music. And I just finished what will likely wind up as one my all-time favorites. Deep Cuts, by Holly Brickley, is a novel about collaboration and inspiration, about jealousy and love, and, simply put, making great art. It's stunning to me that this is a debut novel, but it's the best thing I've read so far this year.

Brickley's novel got me thinking about some of my all-time favorite books in this subgenre. Here are six:

The Song Is You, by Arthur Phillips -- This is a bit of a deep cut itself, but I deeply love this book about a sad, mid-40s divorced man and a beautiful Irish singer who sort of fall in love with each other through their mutual love of music, though without ever meeting in person. Brickley's novel reminded me a lot of this book in terms of how the characters sort of flit in and out of each other's lives and speak to each other through various non-in-person channels. This novel came out in 2009 and was one of the inspirations for actually starting to write about books in some sort of formal way -- and lo and behold The New Dork Review of Books was born. One note about this book, if you decide to pick it up: Almost everyone else who has read it has HATED it. I'm definitely in the minority of people who really liked it.

Lo Fi, by Liz Riggs -- Another debut, this one set in Nashville, about an aspiring songwriter navigating love and life as she tries to find her voice as a musician. Riggs writes with a phenomenal sense of place here, and even if you've never been to a sweaty Nashville club, this novel is a great facsimile. 

Charm City Rocks, by Matthew Norman -- It's not a coincidence that so many novels about music are also love stories, and this one is too. An affable middle-aged dude who harbors a crush for a drummer in an all-female band takes a chance (well, sort of) and contacts her. Will they or won't they? A charming romcom with music at its heart, I loved this book!

Mary Jane, by Jessica Anya Blau -- This coming-of-age story gives big-time Almost Famous vibes. It's about a teenaged girl who spends a summer at the beach as a nanny and meets a famous rockstar who is trying to get clean. Mary Jane begins to realize her so-far sheltered life is not how the world really is. 

Gone to the Wolves, by John Wray -- People are always a little surprised when they find out I love heavy metal. But I do, and I loved this book about a group of teenagers in the 1980s who become obsessed with black metal. The novel is based on a real-life events about the tragic black metal band Havoc. If you know even a little bit of their bonkers story, you'll love this book. There's some great 80s metal references throughout, as well. The characters all sit around and listen to "...and Justice For All" when it for comes out. And at one point in the novel, they're at a glam-rock party in Los Angeles, and one of the characters muses about how if someone just took a look around and laughed, the whole scene would collapse under the weight of its own ridiculousness. It's funny because it's true. 

Daisy Jones & the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid -- Though the hipster characters in Holly Brickey's novel would probably not enjoy this obvious choice, Reid's novel (along with High Fidelity) are the two main comps for Deep Cuts.