I see a lot of memes and quotes from bibliophiles. Sometimes I think that there is a religion of bibliophilia. Libraries are our temples and bookstores our local places of assembly. And books are a way of life. I fear I sometimes proselytize for that faith.
I’ve recently picked up Jeff Crosby’s new World of Wonders, subtitled “a spirituality of reading.” He reminds me that there is a difference between reading as one’s spirituality and how reading might be part of a more encompassing spirituality.
It’s interesting that sacred texts ground many of our major religions. We not only experience the spiritual but understood it through the reading of texts. My own faith, Christianity considers words quite important. God speaks the cosmos into existence. And One who was the Incarnate Word accomplishes our salvation.
Therefore, it is not much of a leap to see reading as something that discloses a “world of wonders.” Reading helps me make sense of the world as well as imagine what could be. Reading has helped me to probe the ineffable and challenged me with the practical implications of loving God and neighborhood. Through biographies, I’ve been mentored by people I’ve never met.
Although I could go on, I’ll just say reading is one of the practices that shapes my spiritual life. However it is not my spiritual life. Rather, reading provides signposts and trail blazes for the journey. And reading captures and holds my imagination in hope amid the world’s bleakness.
But is there a hubris in our flights of philosophy, particularly when we act with abusive superiority over other creatures? William Egginton reviews Christine Webb’s The Arrogant Ape in “Think You’re at the Top of the Food Chain? Think Again.” He also pushes back on her critique of “human exceptionalism.”
Lauren Grodstein is a novelist whose fiction includes a novel set in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. In “What I Learned From the Georgia Protests” she reflects on how Georgians defense of democracy challenged her.
‘Dark academia” is a thing, I’m learning. “Dark Academia Grows Up” uses R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis to explore these questions; “What is the magic that scholars find in the academy?… What are the wrongs they’re asked to quietly endure—the things that make academia, so to speak, dark? And is the magic worth the darkness?”
Finally, Nick Burns contends “AI Isn’t Biased Enough.” While AI has biased based on the material used to train it, AI has no intellectual commitments, no personal biases. It responds sympathetically, even agreeably to whoever engages it–fascist or social progressive. Humans don’t do that, which Burns argues is a good thing.
Quote of the Week
Novelist Frank Yerby, born September 5, 1916, observed:
“Maturity is reached the day we don’t need to be lied to about anything.”
If he’s right, the quote suggests to me that some may never reach maturity!
Miscellaneous Musings
I haven’t read any Dorothy L. Sayers for several years. But recently I picked up a collection of short stories by her featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg. As a result, the stories remind me of both what an exquisite writer Sayers is, and how delightful Wimsey and Egg are as characters!
My son picked up the first of Martha Wells Murderbot series, and all of a sudden I am hearing how good this series is. This piques my interest!
Finally, Buckeye dropped this week and everyone seems astir about this novel set in small town Ohio. So, I picked up a copy to see how true to life it is for this native Buckeye!
Next Week’s Reviews
Monday: John H. Walton with J. Harvey Walton, New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis
Tuesday: Clemency Burton-Hill, Year of Wonder
Wednesday: Janet Kellogg Ray, The God of Monkey Science
Thursday: Miroslav Volf, The Cost of Ambition
Friday: Andrew J. Bauman, Safe Church
So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 31-September 6
Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page
A romantic novel in which the AI prompt was never edited out. A White House report on health citing non-existent sources. An article with summer book recommendations in which some of the authors existed but not the books attributed to them.
One might argue that each of these expose the flaws of AI. I suspect what they really expose is the flaws of the particular humans using this tool. Laziness that doesn’t carefully line edit, that doesn’t verify sources, and that doesn’t confirm the existence and availability of books. Similar to computer programming, AI is only as good as the prompts given it. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Actually, AI has become quite good. A college professor friend now considers AI capable of writing at a professorial level. He shared examples of using AI in various forms of analysis of large amounts of material.
But one thing both of us are agreed upon is that AI offers a dangerous temptation to let it do our thinking for us. It may be a student writing a paper or an author cranking out a steamy novel. What we are doing when we let AI think for us is denying the intrinsic worth of thinking. For many of us, hammering out our ideas in writing serves to clarify thought.
Lest you think I am an AI Luddite, I do believe AI may be a helpful interlocutor in the process. I might ask AI to evaluate an argument for weaknesses or to raise counter arguments. It strikes me that when the chance to do this with real people is unavailable, this could be quite helpful. However, I am still thinking, and indeed, am forced to think harder and better.
I guess what it comes down to is that the ability to think and reason and create from our thoughts is one of the things that makes us human. I’m just not willing to give that up. I’m not ready to slack on the hard work of being a thinking human.
Five Articles Worth Reading
Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher, died recently. Charles Matthewes reviews his life and work in “Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre.”
“In a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy….” This line in “The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze” captured my attention. Sheila McClear explores the connection between our health care inequalities and the explosion of the wellness industry.
Nick Ripatrazone explores the decline of literary criticism in “The Art of the Critic.” Specifically, he argues for the importance of criticism as a benefit not only to audiences but to writers.
Geraldine Brooks is popular with many readers. Her husband died in 2019. In this interview, “Geraldine Brooks Is a Widow Now,” she talks about loss, grief, writing, and her Jewish faith.
Finally, the summer can be a great time to break out of our reading ruts. The New York Times Book Review has published a “Summer Reading Bucket List” of ten literary “to-do’s,” challenging us to see if we can check off five. The even include a copiable checklist!
…And a Video Worth Watching
The Covenant of Water was one of my favorite books of 2024. I have Cutting for Stone on my reading stack. On Thursday, physician and author Abraham Verghese gave the commencement address at Harvard. One of his pieces of advice for students was to commend the importance of reading novels. As an immigrant to the U.S., he also had some thoughtful and challenging critiques of our current political scene. In case you haven’t seen the video, it is worth watching, especially if you appreciate his writing.
Quote of the Week
G. K. Chesterton was born May 29, 1874. I’ve often appreciated his wit and turn of phrase. This one has some good advice:
“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”
Miscellaneous Musings
Regular followers of this blog may have noticed that I have been posting two reviews a day this week. One of these has been of a children’s book published by IVP Kids. What a joy. I’ve loved the combination of brilliant illustration, good writing, and especially the inclusive character of these books. The first book I reviewed, Jesus Loves the Little Children, typified this approach showing pictures of children from every culture as well as children with disabilities. The reason for the extra reviews? I wanted to review these books, compliments of IVP Kids, before passing them along to our church’s Little Free Library, which we’ve just set up.
I was thrilled to visit the new Barnes & Noble store in Dublin, Ohio. When I walked in, it took my breath away–it was huge and overwhelming at first. And it was packed. But I like how the different sections were set apart from each other, many with comfortable seating. Not only that, the cafe was huge. But there was one drawback: the checkout and service counter was smaller than in the old store. And the lines were long.
I like the writing of Amor Towles. And I love bookstores, in case you haven’t noticed. I enjoyed this brief video clip of Towles supporting BINC, a national foundation supporting independent booksellers.
Next Week’s Reviews
Monday: The Month in Reviews: May 2025
Tuesday: Ian Harber, Walking Through Deconstructioin
Wednesday: Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West
Thursday: Brian Goldstone, There is No Place For Us
Friday: Terence Halliday and K.K. Yeo, eds., Justice and Rights
So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for May 25-31, 2025!
Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page
I found myself chuckling while reading Matthew Walther’s “The Hundred Page Strategy.” Partly to keep up with my review schedule on the blog, I read more than that. Every day. I say that not as a point of pride. There was a time when I would not have thought Walther’s goal possible. Now I can say that it is and he offers good suggestions for those of us who want to read more.
Some are simple, like put the smartphone in a drawer. Some are sensible–don’t try to read nothing but heavy, dense books. He reads at times when other people are either sleeping or otherwise engaged. And he carries a book wherever he goes.
There’s nothing special about one hundred pages. His adherence to this goal felt a bit slavish to me. But his recognition of the ways to make space for reading, for doing something one wants to do more of, is laudable. And a stretch goal does help one become ruthless in eliminating what I would call “voluntary distractions” –the ones we choose that fritter away time.
For some, a goal of reading 30-40 pages a day might be more reasonable. You can finish most average size books in about a week. If you’ve wondered how some people read a book a week, this is how.
But the real deal is not how many pages or books we get through but what gets through to us from them. Maybe it is engaging a diverting plot. Or it could be a piece of social analysis of an issue that matters to you. And Walther’s tips can be helpful, no matter how many pages you read and no matter how consistent you are. Read on, friends!
Nikki Giovanni died this week, at age 81. Veronica writes an appraisal of her work for The New York Times, exploring in “When Nikki Giovanni Was Young, Brilliant and Unafraid” how she maintained her vitality and focus over sixty years.
Rhian Sasseen reviews a new series by Solvej Balle that explores the concept of time through a character caught in a time loop in which she wakes up to November 18 every morning after going to bed on November 18 every night. Sassen’s review, “A Novel That Disrupts a Fundamental Law of the Universe,” appears online at The Atlantic.
in “American Literature and the Liberal Way of Life,” Scott M. Reznick proposes that American literature, particularly from the nineteenth century, is an important resource as we engage our politically fraught landscape.
Quote of the Week
Gustave Flaubert, born December 12, 1821, made this succinct statement for all who pursue success to consider:
“Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.”
Miscellaneous Musings
I’m totally going science geek on William Panek’s Pillars of Creation on the Webb telescope. It’s changing our understanding of the universe (and even our own solar system) as it allows us to see further back in time.
I spent one of the most wonderful hours of my life interviewing Matthew Levering a few years ago. He is a Catholic theologian at Mundelein Seminary, and my one overpowering impression was of sitting with a man who deeply loves the Triune God. It was a conversation where I felt I was beholding wonder and beauty. I just began reading his new, Why I Am Roman Catholic and felt like I was back in that interview. I posted an edited transcript of the interview in two parts: One and Two.
I’ve been reading Maigret and the Wine Merchant by Georges Simenon. The wine merchant, who is the murder victim, is a despicable man, a misogynistic womanizer who used his sexual prowess and business power to humiliate men as well as use women. Yet for Maigret, a human life has been taken, a fundamental rent in the fabric of society. I’m deeply disturbed at the valorization of the alleged killer of United Health Care’s CEO. I’m troubled by UHC’s business practices and believe them unjust. But they do not warrant this vigilante justice. And if we valorize it, there will be more such incidents, and over far more petty grievances. And where will it stop?
Next Week’s Reviews
Here’s the lineup for next week:
Monday: My “Best Books” post, the books I read that I thought best in various categories.
Tuesday: James Hely Hutchinson, Answering the Psalmist’s Perplexity.
Wednesday: Margery Allingham, The China Governess.
Thursday: William Kent Krueger, Thunder Bay
Friday: Christopher M. Hays, Eight Million Exiles.
Well, that’s The Weekly Wrap for December 8-14, 2024!
Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.
One of the most exciting and disturbing developments that has come to light in the last year is the development of highly sophisticated artificial intelligence “chatbots” capable of producing text often indistinguishable from and sometimes superior to that of human beings, across a variety of subjects. The most prominent of these is ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. It was released in prototype version November 30, 2022, resulting in an explosion of discussion.
ChatGPT will respond to a question or command. For esample, I asked ChatGPT “Who was Louis Bromfield?” ChatGPT responded:
Louis Bromfield was an American author and conservationist, born in Ohio in 1896. He was a successful and popular writer in the 1920s and 1930s, producing a number of novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Early Autumn” (1926). He was also known for his conservation work and was a pioneer in sustainable agriculture and land management practices.
In the 1930s, Bromfield established an experimental farm in Ohio, known as Malabar Farm, where he implemented his ideas about conservation and sustainable agriculture. He wrote several books about his experiences on the farm, including “Malabar Farm” (1947) and “Pleasant Valley” (1945), which detailed his efforts to preserve the natural environment and promote sustainable farming practices.
Bromfield’s work had a significant impact on the fields of agriculture and conservation, and his legacy continues to influence modern thinking about sustainable land management and environmental protection.
ChatGPT, generated 2/2/2023 at 7:38pm
I subsequently asked it “Say more about his writing and how its works are evaluated.” It produced a response focusing on his novels but says little about his later works which were generally considered inferior, churned out to fund his farming efforts. So, I asked it about his work at Malabar Farm in Mansfield, Ohio, which I have visited several times. It described his pioneering efforts in sustainable agriculture and described the farm as financially successful. The latter is a more dubious claim. Bromfield was constantly trying to raise money from writing and movie deals to make ends meet.
What is concerning to many is that ChatGPT generates responses that are often factual and crisply written, as in the example above. Can you see how this might be used by students pressed for time, or just not that eager to put in the work to write a term paper? There is a good deal of concerned conversation in academic circles about the implications for everything from admissions essays to term papers to academic articles.
It is also being suggested that ChatGPT and other chatbots could put writers out of business in many fields. It can write advertising blurbs and in some genres, especially those with fast turnaround times, novelist are using ChatGPT to at least help produce content.
One the positive side, a case can be made that ChatGPT is another tool, like Wikipedia or Google, to quickly research a subject. People are already talking about the kinds of tasks that could be done by a chatbot. This could improve productivity, although it may mean that many writing jobs may be on the line. It’s probably time for those who write in some form for a living to ask, “can a chatbot do that?”
At the same time, there are problems with blind reliance on chatbots. At its most basic, OpenAI warns, “May occasionally generate incorrect information.” I indicated some instances in the examples above where the responses were questionable. I also asked ChatGPT for citations supporting its responses and it said it could not do that but recommended several works, none of which, as far as I can ascertain, actually exist. This problem has been widely noted as has a tendency of ChatGPT to “hallucinate,” to create totally fanciful responses. ChatGPT also warns:
May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content
Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021
Teachers are already developing assignments that recognize the limitations of ChatGPT and testing those assignments on ChatGPT. Others are assuming its use and integrating it into the composition process. The use of ChatGBT actually offers an interesting exercise in how one verifies the veracity of information. Since the sources on which ChatGBT draws aren’t transparent, the writer will want to look at other reputable sources, and this helps teach discrimination between reputable and questionable sources.
The biggest problem, of course, is plagiarism. To use a ChatGBT product as verbatim, or substantially, without quotation marks or attribution, representing it as one’s own ideas, is plagiarism. TechCrunch reports that OpenAI has even created a tool to detect AI generated, including ChatGPT generated, text. At present, it is only 26 percent effective. Now the interesting question comes, how does one handle works that do cite ChatGPT? I suspect that syllabi and specific assignments will have to address this, as well as the consequences for Chatbot plagiarism.
So, what about blogs by chatbot? I tried this experiment. I asked ChatGPT to review Alex Haley’s Roots. I’ve never written a review of this book. It produced the following:
“Roots: The Saga of an American Family” by Alex Haley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book and television miniseries that was first published in 1976. It is a historical novel that traces the journey of an African man named Kunta Kinte and seven generations of his descendants, from his capture and enslavement in Africa, to his life in America and the eventual liberation of his descendants. The book was based on Haley’s own genealogical research and oral history from his family, and it was groundbreaking in its depiction of the African American experience. It sparked a renewed interest in genealogy and African American history, and has been widely praised for its impact on American culture and society.
ChatGPT, generated 2/2/2023 at 7:00 pm
That’s a nice, succinct summary, but not nearly long enough for my blog reviews. So I tried this “Review in the style of bobonbooks.com.” ChatGPT produced this:
“Roots: The Saga of an American Family” by Alex Haley is a magnificent piece of literature that tells the story of one African American family’s journey from slavery to freedom. This book is a powerful and emotional read that provides a vivid representation of the horrors of slavery, as well as the resilience of the human spirit.
The narrative follows the life of Kunta Kinte, an African man who is captured and sold into slavery, and traces the experiences of his descendants over several generations. The character development is excellent, with each character being unique and memorable in their own way. Haley’s writing is both descriptive and evocative, painting a vivid picture of the time period and bringing the story to life.
One of the most significant aspects of “Roots” is its depiction of slavery, which is graphic, honest, and heart-wrenching. The book serves as a reminder of the atrocities committed against Africans and African Americans, and it’s a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.
In conclusion, “Roots” is a landmark work of African American literature that should be read by all. Its impact on American culture and society cannot be overstated, and it remains an important and relevant book to this day. Highly recommended!
ChatGPT, generated 2/2/2023 at 7:02 pm
Hmm. That does sound a bit more like what I do–still shorter and less detailed than what I usually write. I rarely use words like “emotional read” or “Highly recommended.” I do like words like “resilience” and “evocative.” It does follow the form of many of my reviews, although it feels more “generic” than what I might write. And I found no typos, which can rarely be said of me. It would be interesting to know what others think.
But I won’t be turning to ChatGPT to write my reviews or other blog posts. Here’s why:
Fundamentally, I like crafting my own reviews. I write them to remember what I read.
ChatGPT cannot know by itself how I actually engaged with a book–what I thought, how I reacted–it can only summarize the content and mimic my style. There is a serendipitous element to all this–I often discover what I think as I write.
For better or worse, my writing cannot help but reflect my life experiences and my deepest values, neither of which are static.
Part of the implicit contract with both publisher and public is honesty. Will ChatGPT say that a book just doesn’t cut it?
No one needs to visit Bob on Books to know what ChatGBT thinks of a book (and I would have to be honest in attribution).
Chatbots are here to stay. We’ve been using Seri and Alexa for years. We engage them when we seek online support. And the new AI of ChatGBT is becoming increasingly successful at simulating our human neural networks while accessing vast sources of information and articulating its responses in reasonably interesting text. And those mistakes? AI is iterative, which means it learns and corrects those mistakes. I asked ChatGBT about something I’m very familiar with, the history of Youngstown. It was accurate, except it said that John Young was from Pennsylvania, when in fact, he was from Whitestown, New York. I corrected this and then asked where John Young was from and it gave the correct answer. Part of the reason for the free release of this powerful tool was to learn and refine it through user interactions like the ones I’ve recorded here.
But I won’t be using it to write my blog. I’ll keep reading the books, keep writing about things that interest me, and keep researching, checking sources against sources when I can. That doesn’t guarantee that I won’t make mistakes, but they’ll be mine, and part of my own iterative learning process, part of my lifelong formation. I will not delegate that to a chatbot.
