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I’ve enjoyed lots of Cory Doctorow‘s novels, but my favorite Doctorow is the cultural critic, the passionate believer in technology who is continually disappointed by the ways that the greed and egos of the Big Tech company have corrupted all that boundless possibility.

That’s why I loved Doctorow’s latest, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Doctorow applies his decades of experience on the cutting edge of technology to the problem of artificial intelligence, and he comes away with a more nuanced take than, say, the more passionate opponents like Ed Zitron. He finds things to like about AI—I agree with him that AI transcription is a godsend for writers on a budget and a godsend—even as he discards the hype that AI hucksters have been forcing down our throats for the past two years.

Doctorow also provides a roadmap through the future, guiding us through the AI financial bubble that he is confident will eventually burst, and offering us some ideas about what life might be like on the other side. It’s a remarkably level-headed and thoughtful argument, and even if the future doesn’t unfold exactly the way he predicts, you can respect his arguments for why he made those specific predictions.

The audiobook version of of Centaur’s is a breezy five hours long, and Doctorow happens to write in exactly the same voice that he speaks in, making it an enjoyable listen—it’s essentially the same listening experience as a handful of tech podcasts, only without the insufferable AI ads stitched throughout and with a much more intelligent host.

I can’t say that I feel 100 percent better about AI after reading this book, but I can say that I feel better about the future, now that I’ve seen Doctorow’s vision of it. And in these times, an author who can relieve you of a little bit of anxiety is worth their weight in gold.

I adore the premise of John Lanchester’s latest novel Look What You Made Me Do. It’s about a grieving widow, one half of a formerly happily married elderly couple, who one day discovers that all of her marital secrets—the in-jokes and private sexual activities—have been written into a wildly popular Netflix series.

That’s catchy, right? And Lanchester really sets the trap beautifully, describing the happy marriage and the widow’s grief—and then languishing in her torment when her entire marriage seems to be exploited and wholesale transformed into an appointment-television entertainment.

But without posting spoilers, I have to say that I’m disappointed with one of the many twists and turns in this very twisty and turny book, to the point where it feels like Lanchester is letting himself off a little bit easy.

And there’s one very obvious error in the book that I can’t believe made it through editing. The Netflix series that everyone is watching is for some reason released in weekly installments, like a linear television show. If Lanchester felt it so important to dole the TV show out on a weekly basis, you’d think someone would have suggested that the show be released on one of the streaming services that actually releases shows on a weekly basis, like Apple or HBO Max, rather than Netflix, which is famous for its binge-release model.

That sounds like picking nits, but I think it gets to a problem of Look What You Made Me Do: The book never feels quite willing to bathe in the gorgeous pool of slop that it meticulously sets up for itself. It’s a nasty little dark thriller with literary airs, and so in that way it never manages to give the reader the satisfaction of living up to its glorious, tawdry title.

When I was reading Emil Wilson’s debut graphic memoir, The Nightingales, I kept wondering about Wilson’s experience as a cartoonist. I ultimately finished the book with two assumptions, either of which could be equally true: Either Emil Wilson was a voracious reader of comics and graphic novels and had a mile-deep understanding of the history of the medium, or Emil Wilson had never read a graphic novel before in his life.

I say this because The Nightingales violates multiple rules of the comics medium—especially the forms of American comics. Rather than boxing actions out sequentially in a series of panels, Wilson presents the story in a series of sketchbook pages. And while actions are the propulsive energy in most of the comics we read, the emotions are the verb that pull our eyes across the page in the Nightingales.

There’s one page early in the book when our protagonist meets a new houseguest, and Wilson portrays their faces as a jumble of rough sketches spread across the page, layered on top of each other with no panels to get in the way. The characters make eye contact and look away. They eye each other skeptically and they smirk before smiling warmly at each other and then shyly averting their eyes. I’d never seen such a nuanced, wordless encounter portrayed so honestly and so clearly on a comics page.

Wilson, I decided, was either someone who deeply understood all the rules of comics and chose to break them in an inventive way, or he was someone who never became accustomed to the rules of comics—and so wasn’t imprisoned by that knowledge.

Last week, I interviewed Wilson onstage at the Elliott Bay Book Company and the first thing I asked him was his experience with cartooning and comics. His answer was clarifying: “None,” he said immediately. Aside from thumbing through a couple of Peanuts paperbacks in an extended family member’s bathroom, Wilson had never felt drawn to the medium at all.

So how did Wilson wind up deciding to tell a deeply personal story in the form of comics? After a career in advertising, Wilson gathered with some friends of roughly the same age to contemplate turning fifty and the loss of someone in their friend group. He decided that he wanted to take his skills with words and pictures that he had learned in advertising and turn it into a different kind of storytelling career.

So Wilson got into the Center for Cartoon Studies

in Vermont and took a crash course in comics. (During our talk, he bragged that he was the second-oldest enrollee the institution ever accepted.) Eventually, he decided to adapt a family story into comics form. And I call it a memoir, but Wilson actually writes himself out of the book within the first ten pages—the story is told by and stars Wilson’s sister, Lou.

Talking with Wilson was an illuminating and inspiring experience. It’s the only author interview I’ve ever done that made me want to immediately open the book and read it all over again, armed with the understanding I’d just gained.

One of my big complaints about modern comics is that some of the biggest and most popular creators are only familiar with comics. It’s hard to picture some of the most popular graphic novelists of our time reading a prose novel, or attending a play and absorbing lessons from the experience that they then incorporate into their work. The field has gotten incestuous in a dangerous way.

Wilson’s total lack of familiarity with the medium has paid off for all of us. The Nightingales is a touching, tender, and inventive graphic memoir that’s unlike anything else I’ve read. I’m so glad Wilson upended his life and launched into this bold second act.

I can’t recall the last time a blurb inspired me to read a book that I wasn’t already going to read. Blurb culture has gotten so safe and inoffensive that blurbs are basically white noise—some distracting lines on book covers that might, if you squint, give you some idea where the author went to university.

I was already going to read Stephen Graham Jones’s historical vampire novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but the one blurb on the cover of the book actually caught my eye. It was only three words and a website attribution:

“Horror’s Moby Dick.”

—Vulture

How the hell can you ignore that blurb? That’s a gigantic promise, right there. And the book has received enough raves that the blurb seemed credible—it might not just be rampant hyperbole. Buffalo Hunter Hunter was, the cover of the paperback edition helpfully informs us, a New York Times Notable Book of 2025, and the first page informs us it was also near the top of the list for honors as varied as the Bram Stoker Award, the Nebula Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and Barack Obama’s summer reading list. So maybe this centuries-spanning story of an undead wanderer seeking justice for a Blackfeet Indian massacre actually was Melville’s second coming?

Friends, that blurb stuck in my head so badly that it actively worsened my reading experience. The whole time I was reading, I wondered, “is this passage what that reviewer thought was Moby Dick-esque? What’s so Mellvillian about this?”

This is a silly complaint to hold against such an impressive book. I thought The Buffalo Hunter Hunter had a lot to say about American history, about the treatment of indigenous peoples, about wars and tragedies and how we collectively move on from tragedies and wars. The book was full of clever touches and compelling characters. While the story never completely won over my heart, I was impressed by nearly every aspect of storytelling.

But every time I opened or closed the book, I had that telltale blurb staring me in the face and I just couldn’t shake it.

What were they thinking? Did the blurber ever even read Moby Dick, or is it just their generic stand-in for a Big Important Book? There’s no way to tell. I can’t find any review or roundup or interview that includes those words on Vulture. Searching Vulture’s archive for “Horror’s Moby Dick” or “Buffalo Hunter Hunter” brings back zero results.

Who wrote the goddamned blurb? What did they mean when they wrote it? I guess we’ll never know. But wherever they came from, I hope whoever first wrote the words “Horror’s Moby Dick” in reference to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter will understand that I hate them for tainting my reading experience so badly that I will never be able to even look at that book again without thinking of their goddamned alluring, misleading, distracting blurb.