Summer Reading Lists, AI, and an elevator descent into the hellish nightmare where I have no friends and nothing ever goes right.
But it is getting warmer and it's shorts season so there's that
Whew. That’s a long ass title. Things can’t really be that bad. They aren’t. I just have one or two moments every day where out of nowhere, at least to bystanders, I vocalize.
I’m walking down a street, or from a parking lot into a store. And I look up and say, “Dammit!” or “Fuck. Fuck this shit.” Then I proceed onward like everything is all fine and dandy. I do realize by telling you this, I risk outing myself as unwell, or having a mental health challenge. I promise I’m not. What’s happening inside that brain o’mine? Sometimes nothing more than my mind working on the fix to a script or a story or some writing. Going down what I think is a smooth story highway with no speed limit, and then I realize - I can’t separate the ensemble cast at the end of act two like I wanted to because I thought it would be an escalation. Now it just feels like a stall, or worse, a repeated beat. “Fuck. (I’m not on a story highway. I’m on a story dead end street going 100 MPH.) Fuck this shit. (Now I have to go all the way back to the start of the act in my head.)” Other times it is maybe what you fear. Exactly me remembering I am alive in May of 2025 and May of 2025 isn’t really as great as I or any of us thought it would be. “Dammit!”
And then this. I finished reading a book about Hank Aaron. After the last out of a World Series, I pull a baseball book off one of my shelves and dive in, happy to be reading about baseball if I can’t watch baseball for the few months of winter there’s no baseball. And I am always reading more than one book at a time, it keeps me bouncing around and all the things I’m interested in seem more alive when I’m reading multiple stories. I’ve got a stack and I grab a one of those book depending on how much time I can spare to give to it in any given moment. I thought this week, in honor of the beginning of summer, I’d share with you my current reading list today. “Peter’s Summer Reading List.”
And then I read this.
And I got super excited. And a little nervous. But mostly excited. The Chicago Sun Times, like a lot of newspapers, has fallen on hard times. I’m not excited about that. I hate that. I’m excited by what happened next.
The Chicago Sun Times got in some trouble over using AI to write an article. It falls on hard times, people get laid off. Promises are made to make it profitable. And the only way is reducing staff. And buying articles from third party companies that will write things in bulk and sell them. Things like, “How to plant a garden,” “What’s under your sink is poison!” and junk like that.
Bet you can see where this is going, even if you didn’t click the link above.
They published a summer reading list from a third party that used AI to write the summer reading list and a bunch of the books on the list aren’t even books!
This is what I get super excited about. I’ve always had a streak in me of wanting to throw gasoline on a fire. Let’s cut to the chase and just go knock it all down. I’m great in mobs for helping push the mob over the edge into action. If you’re planning a mob, hit me up.
Someone should get to work using AI to write one of these fake books and then get it self-published on Amazon to see how it does.
Here are the fake books on the list. We’re going to do three lists today, so hang tight.
LIST OF FAKE BOOKS FROM CHICAGO SUN TIMES THAT YOU SHOULD READ THIS SUMMER.
• "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende – A multigenerational saga set in a coastal town, blending magical realism with environmental activism.
• "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir – A science-driven thriller about a programmer discovering a conscious AI influencing global events.
• "Nightshade Market" by Min Jin Lee – A tale set in Seoul’s underground economy, following three women navigating illegal markets.
• "Boiling Point" by Rebecca Makkai – A story about a climate scientist dealing with personal and professional challenges.
• "Hurricane Season" by Brit Bennett – A novel exploring family dynamics during a tumultuous storm season.
• "The Longest Day" by Rumaan Alam – A narrative delving into the complexities of modern life over a single day.
• "Migrations" by Maggie O’Farrell – A journey through time and space, focusing on themes of displacement and identity.
• "The Rainmakers" by Percival Everett – A story about individuals attempting to control weather patterns for personal gain.
I didn’t rank them, because it’s hard to rank fake books that fake exist. But I will tell you that I’ve always been a fan of Isabel Allende’s work. And a novel set in the same town as the New York Mets minor league team, The Tidewater Tide, sounds like something I’d be into. Andy Weir and Min Jin Lee both said they haven’t ever written the books they are credited with. And they never will.
But someone should. Should it be me? But I wouldn’t want to impersonate a famous author, or steal from them. Or steal from anyone. That doesn’t seem right.
If I use AI to write a book, with the title of, “Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende – A Multigenerational Saga Set in a Coastal Town, Blending Magical Realism with Environmental Activism,” by Peter Murrieta (using AI), who’s book would that be?
Here’s what “I (AI)” came up with.
Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allend—A multigenerational saga set in a coastal town, blending magical realism with environmental activism.
By Peter Murrieta (using AI)
Chapter One: What We Inherit
This is not Isabel Allende’s book.
It isn’t lost or stolen or falsely attributed. It was never hers. Not exactly. But for months—maybe years—I dreamt in her paragraphs. I heard her rhythm in the surf. I saw her fingerprints in the fog that rose off the Pacific like a grandmother’s sigh. I opened my notebook and there she was—just out of frame, just beyond the final punctuation. Not a ghost. Not quite a muse. Something quieter. A presence in parentheses.
The truth is, I borrowed the title before I had the story.
Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allend—
That’s how it appeared in a half-formed dream I wrote down on the back of a parking receipt. No ending punctuation. Just an em dash. A hand reaching forward.
So here I am, trying to finish the gesture.
The story begins, as these stories often do, with salt and silence. A coastline that used to be called Santa Brígida, before the maps were redrawn and the fish stopped spawning near the docks. The people who stayed behind say the ocean remembers, even if the government doesn’t.
Marisol Duarte is the first voice we follow. She’s sixteen, allergic to plastic, and speaks in declarations that feel like prophecies. Her grandmother, Florencia, plants kelp gardens in buckets behind the community center when she isn’t being an usher for the Tidewater Tide ball team. Her mother, Esperanza, runs a pirate radio station no one admits to listening to. And her great-grandmother, who no one believes is still alive, is seen walking the beach just before the king tides, pulling something heavy behind her in the sand.
This is a novel about them. About land that won’t sit still. About stories that keep coming back, even when they weren’t told right the first time.
This is Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allend—, but I wrote it. Or dreamed it. Or dredged it up.
And now, maybe, it’s yours.
—P.M. (A.I.)
I’m sure it would only take me a couple of days to “write” the novel. But I’m too impatient to do that. Let’s skip ahead to some fake reviews for the fake book.
A Ghost Story in Reverse
Reviewed by Celeste Barros
The New York Review of Books
There is no author named Isabel Allend—, and yet there may never have been a more precise homage to her spirit than Tidewater Dreams, the strange and hypnotic novel credited instead to Peter Murrieta (using AI). The title, with its unfinished em dash, serves as both invitation and ellipsis—a book haunted by the idea of another book, one that might have existed in a different timeline, a different tongue.
Murrieta, known primarily for his work in television and screenwriting, surprises here with a literary artifact that reads like an act of cultural archaeology. The novel spans five generations of women in a fictitious coastal town slowly drowning under the weight of industrial neglect and memory. Its environmental themes are not merely topical; they’re spiritual, encoded in the bones of kelp forests, whispered in the margins of forgotten maps.
But what makes Tidewater Dreams remarkable isn’t just its setting or scope. It’s the way the novel plays with authorship itself. Murrieta does not impersonate Allende; he communes with her—through echoes of magical realism, through the soft melancholia of matriarchal storytelling, through a narrative structure that feels inherited rather than constructed. It is part novel, part séance. And all without using the baseball town backdrop to fall into cliches about the game being life, etc.
Of course, there will be those who question the book’s subtitle—“by Peter Murrieta (using AI)”—as a provocation, or worse, a gimmick. But to read Tidewater Dreams is to understand that the AI in question is less a tool and more a lens: not to generate prose, but to simulate the haunting of influence, to chase a style and intentionally miss it by inches in order to say something new.
In the end, Tidewater Dreams is not a novel about climate change, or matriarchy, or authorship, though it contains all three. It is a novel about what we inherit—not just land or language, but the longing to be understood by those who came before us. Even if we never meet.
Exciting stuff. We all long to be understood by those who came before us. Which are… ghosts, I guess?
Second list coming up. This one is
LIST OF REAL BOOKS FROM PETER’S READING THIS SUMMER.
• "Indiana Jones And The Dance of Giants" by Rob MacGregor – Indy teams up with a brilliant British scholar to investigate a mysterious ancient manuscript, only to become entangled in a deadly conspiracy involving a secret society and the legendary figure of Merlin.
• "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace – A book about some folks who play tennis, I’m told.
• "The Aztec Myths" by Camilla Townsend – The perfect introduction to the world of Aztec myth and legend.
• "The Message" by Ta-Nehsi Coates – The intertwine of memoir, travelogue, and cultural critique as Coates reflects on his journeys to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine, exploring how narratives shape our understanding of race, identity, and justice.
• "Catching The Big Fish" by David Lynch – The filmmaker shares insights on creativity, meditation, and the artistic process, revealing how accessing deeper levels of consciousness fuels his work.
And to complete the elevator descent into this hellish nightmare that is May 2025, here’s a list of fake books by those same authors from the same AI that made the Chicago Sun Times fake list.
LIST OF FAKE BOOKS PETER CAN’T READ THIS SUMMER UNTIL YOU USE AI TO WRITE THEM FOR HIM
• Indiana Jones and the Veins of Neptune by Rob MacGregor - A long-lost Roman map leads Indy into a hidden underwater civilization off the coast of Malta, where an ancient artifact may control the tides—and time itself.
• The Jest Multiplier by David Foster Wallace - A recursive novel-in-footnotes that follows a graduate student studying the marginalia of Infinite Jest, only to find himself absorbed (literally) into the annotations.
• Feathered Skulls: A Personal Cosmology by Camilla Townsend - Blending memoir and myth, Townsend “reimagines” her own lineage through the lens of Aztec storytelling, guided by visions of Coyolxauhqui and a recurring dream of a jaguar on a fire escape.
• Nowhere But Here by Ta-Nehisi Coates - A speculative memoir set in an alternate timeline where the transatlantic slave trade never occurred—raising questions about identity, memory, and justice in a world that never was.
• Fish Don’t Think About the Water by David Lynch - A collection of koan-like essays and line drawings, in which Lynch explores the metaphysics of coffee, dreams of an invisible duck, and the possibility that reality is just a badly lit hallway in a Red Room.
I think that calls for a, “Dammit!” and also an out loud, “Fuck. Fuck this shit.”
I leave you with this fake cover to a fake book based on a real cover to a real book.
And with the final thought that as I wrote this, I got news that a job I was up for, didn’t come my way. And like a lot of these things, it wasn’t even a job I was sure I wanted. But I fell in love with my take on the material in the process of building out a pitch on how I’d approach the IP, and so the sting of rejection is real as hell. On to the next! Thank you for reading and for telling your friends about this space and my writing here. We get the wins and the not wins here. Always want to tell it like it is. See you next week and have a great holiday weekend.
Want a story? How about a legacy family from 1957 and the third generation (a woman) in charge and the challenges within the manufacturing world and family dynamics. Just. Thouggggtttt….
Yeah, dammit.