6 can’t-miss books I certainly won’t read this summer (because, well, I already read them)
For the latest in the experimental BTS @ ESC series, we mark our six-month anniversary by rounding up six books that got you talking. But this wouldn't be ESC KEY .CO unless we turned a listicle into an exploration of why book lists have such cultural power — and why lists will outlive the internet.
As you know, nearly every week, we deliver your TL;DR Briefing on the things worth tracking (and talking about over your next power lunch, always said with an exaggerated wink).
This week we’re not doing that.
Instead, in this installment for the occasionally-unhinged BTS @ ESC series, we’re reviewing six books and authors we’ve featured in our first six months that really got you talking. (But we’re still following the TL;DR Briefing template — “The thing is,” “The thing about that is” and so forth — because, well, heatwave brain.)
The thing is:
I made several promises with myself before the very soft launch of ESC KEY .CO back in January. One of them was “never publish ‘best of’ book lists.”
No “best books of 2025” list. No “essential reading for AI critics” list. No “the books that help us understand internet culture” reading list. But, most importantly, absolutely no summer book list, thereby no mentions of “poolside” or “beach reads” or “thrillers to keep your attention when you’re lounging around the Med this August.” (I’ll leave the latter to the ever-on-brand Monocle.)
There’s, of course, nothing wrong with a listicle of cultural artifacts. In fact, as an editor who’s worked through plenty of media “pivots” and “disruptions,” listicles have felt like one of the few consistent parts of my career from print magazines and travel guidebooks to digital media and newsletters. Lists have always been there, even as the format and medium changes. Therefore, I will keenly read any substantive writing and research about the form. And about the history of lists, as well! Some experimental editorial play with lists? Sure, I’ll write an unhinged essay about that, sign me up. Wikipedia’s list of lists of lists? This is where my most generative clickholes often begin. I could go on.
To be clear, I’ve written “best of” book lists (and made it queer).
And, indeed, I’ve contributed to “it’s almost summer” book preview lists (and also made it queer).
Lists themselves are fine, even fun. What’s weird, though, is the entire seasonal reading industrial complex that’s metastasized around them. As Maris Kreizman noted last year in LitHub, most of these ubiquitous preview lists are compiled by, as she put it, “underpaid freelance writers (me, included!)” who “don't actually have to have read the books they write about.” To Kreizman’s point, it’s virtually impossible for any writer to financially sustain themselves with book-related coverage to fund them reading so deeply. Even on-staff critics and editors swim in an ocean of ARCs, or advance reader copies.
Instead, contributors craft punchy blurbs for titles they’re “excited to read eventually,” often just repackaging marketing copy with whatever witticism they have “ready to go.” As she’s been pointing out for years, including in a 2018 Dame essay, the entire exercise is fundamentally flawed because “personal taste is the key factor in making someone connect to art” — yet we’re obsessed with lists that present subjective preferences as objective authority.
The thing about that is:
This, of course, isn’t exactly new. The Bookman, America’s first best-seller list dating to 1895, openly admitted their rankings were “largely arbitrary” and “fairly approximate” — yet those flawed lists immediately gained the power to make books into best sellers simply by the act of listing them. As scholar Elizabeth Della Zazzera observed in a 2020 long-read in Lapham’s Quarterly: “Books that appeared on these lists, whether or not they were truly the top-selling books of their day, became best sellers because the lists said they were.”
We’ve been trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle of literary authority for more than a century. Publishers promote books based on list potential. Media outlets craft coverage around anticipated buzz. Readers absorb the message that reading should follow the calendar. The machine feeds itself.
The truly absurd part of summer reading culture is this: we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that our brains need different books when it’s hot outside. The cultural mythology of beach reads versus serious literature creates this weird seasonal binary where July supposedly calls for different intellectual stimulation than January. It’s fascinating how we’ve organized our entire literary discourse around the weather. (And yet, as we learn more about the changing climate’s impacts on our brains and productivity, there might be something to it.)
Where things get interesting:
The reason why I’m not publishing book previews or best-of lists is because I want this to be a venue for the writing I’m finding fewer outlets for: work that engages deeply with the ideas behind compelling books and the authors shaping how we understand technology, culture and creative work today.
And yet this article is, in fact, a list.
The way I’m getting around my own rule is by publishing a list of books I won’t be reading this summer. Because I already read them. Yes, to mark six months of ESC KEY .CO, I’m rounding up six books that got you talking the most: five recent-ish releases plus one 19th-century Marxist polemic about laziness, because someone should advocate for that in summer. The following six books didn’t just cross my desk; they shaped months of conversations, sparked reader debates and continue influencing how we think about our very online era.
Consider this your ICYMI guide to the ideas that have been worth talking about all year, the books that might actually give you something to, sure, read poolside and, well, dive into.
Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s “The AI Con” (Penguin Books)
Originally featured here:
JD Shadel
Why it's a can't miss read:
Written by two of the broligarchy’s most formidable critics, this cathartic book recounts popcorn-worthy reasons to reject the hype “with the sharpest needles we can find.” Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, co-authored the widely cited 2021 paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” Hanna formerly worked as senior research scientist on Google’s Ethical AI team; now, she is director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), the non-profit founded by Timnit Gebru. (Google ultimately fired Gebru due to the publication of the “Stochastic Parrots” paper, which she co-authored.) Together, Bender and Hanna have earned a following for speaking sense in the age of “AI” through their podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. The book isn’t merely a roast but a field guide offering strategies for resistance, from unionizing writers to creatives “spoiling” training data. The authors are clear-eyed about how the hype is ultimately an exertion of power, and calling it out can be risky for some: “To speak up to say the emperor has no clothes is difficult. And it is doubly so when surprisingly many people, especially those in positions of power, seemingly want to be the naked emperors.” For creative workers feeling under siege, Bender told ESC KEY .CO she hopes the book “brings a sense of renewed possibility: both in terms of what can be achieved through solidarity and in terms of arguments that can be presented to those who buy synthetic media.” Adding to that, Hanna told me: “Workers are banding together, and it's especially important right now. We hope that creatives can take hope in this, and that the book can help foment new avenues of collective action.”
Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI” (Penguin Books)
Originally featured here:
JD Shadel
Why it's a can't miss read:
It’s the book Sam Altman doesn’t want you to read. This instant New York Times bestseller traces the supply chain of “AI” from Silicon Valley engineers to data laborers in Africa to water activists in South America, revealing how today’s tech economy recreates colonial patterns of extraction. Hao said she took inspiration from the narrative techniques behind the Netflix series “The Crown,” and this sweeping story of OpenAI’s rise is full of wild, vividly rendered characters. Her central insight cuts through all the hype: “AI” has been a marketing term since John McCarthy coined it in 1956 to “get money for a summer study,” she told ESC KEY .CO earlier this year. The contemporary debate isn’t really scientific but “a business debate, a political debate, an economic debate” shaped by corporate actors with self-interested agendas and some out-there ideologies. For readers wanting to cut through the spin, Hao is essential reading. She shows how to spot red flags like vague terminology that obscures critical distinctions between vastly different systems. As she told me, “It’s really hard to understand which tech you’re talking about when you use the term AI.” Recently, I saw Hao speak to The Observer book club at an event in London, and there wasn’t enough time for all the audience’s questions. Hao’s deeply reported yet equally entertaining page-turner has undeniably captured the zeitgeist.
Oliver Haimson’s “Trans Technologies” (MIT Press)
Originally featured here:
JD Shadel
Why it's a can't miss read:
After interviewing more than 100 trans tech creators, Haimson delivers a surprisingly accessible study of what alternative tech futures could look like. His research reveals a thriving ecosystem of resistance through design, from voice training apps to healthcare directories to mutual aid platforms. These aren’t mere adaptations of mainstream tools but fundamental reimaginings of what technology can be. The scope surprised even Haimson: browser extensions that automatically replace deadnames, “do not travel” maps helping families navigate hostile legislation, digital archives preserving systematically erased histories and even paired game jams where creators process both “rage” and “joy.” Haimson’s concept of “plasticity” describes technologies designed for complexity, transition and transformation — tech that works “even if your identity today is very different from what it was a few months ago.” As he told me: “I study technology to learn more about transness, and trans identity to understand more about technology.” The book includes delightful moments of shade (trans tech pioneer Lynn Conway bluntly telling him, “You use ‘trans technology’ as if it were a thing”) alongside serious analysis of how marginalized communities build more habitable digital worlds. At a moment when fascist currents threaten marginalized communities, “Trans Technologies” offers both critique and blueprint: anti-fascist technology built from the ground up to center community needs rather than extractive profit models.
Katherine Cross’s “Log Off” (LittlePuss Press)
Originally featured here:
JD Shadel
Why it's a can't miss read:
Cross delivers one of the smartest books about social media this decade, cutting through both Big Tech spin and fediverse hopes with practical realism. Her key argument: social media tricks us into believing we’re participating in meaningful collective action when we’re mostly just creating content. The illusion keeps us engaged, and that is the point. Speaking from experience, she admitted to me: “The main beneficiary of a lot of that online activism was me. I became microfamous. I got work. I met interesting people. But I really didn’t contribute to moving the needle on anything by posting.” The platforms excel at individual catharsis but fail at building sustainable change. Even after seeing the surge of Harris enthusiasm from coconut memes to "kamala IS brat" tweets, Cross’s instincts proved correct: “Memes don’t vote.” Her call to “log off” isn’t about detachment but action — less nihilistic shitposting, more direct organizing in our immediate communities. In the process, she also reveals some of what social media is good for, which is mostly jokes. After all, she told me she decided against the title “Delete Your Account,” because sometimes jokes are fun. It’s a refreshingly honest and entertaining read from ESC KEY .CO’s first interviewee.
Andy Crysell’s “Selling the Night” (Velocity Press)
Originally featured here:
JD Shadel
Why it's a can't miss read:
Trade groups warn that all UK clubs could close by 2030 without urgent action — a campaign claim that, while perhaps hyperbolic, underscores the genuine threat the industry faces. Crysell’s book documents the fraught terrain where underground culture meets corporate cash, tracking the tension between community-centered movements and corporatization. It’s a book about dance music that ends up being about everything else. The stakes crystallized in 2019 when a DJ wore a massive Colonel Sanders helmet at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival — peak corporate absurdity that Pitchfork declared represented “general spiritual decay.” “When you look at the creative industries in honesty, it really is about a handful of very large corporations that rule it,” Crysell told me before the book’s release. “The money is not being evenly distributed. It is tending to create very monocultural outputs.” Yet despite brands chasing cultural relevance through increasingly absurd stunts and gentrification pressures, he maintains qualified optimism: “I wouldn’t bet against the appeal of people getting together in a space to dance to some loud music.”
Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to Be Lazy” (Public Domain Reading Club)
Originally featured here:
JD Shadel
Why it's a can't miss read:
Written from Saint-Pélagie Prison in Paris by Marx’s son-in-law, this 1883 polemic feels shockingly relevant to our current era of productivity porn and “AI-sterity.” The U.S. government once denied mailing privileges to the publisher, alleging the book violated the Espionage Act. Lafargue's central paradox: while machines should make labor easier, they’re ultimately transformed into tools that intensify human toil. The productivity gains don’t give workers more time off; they increase profitability. His wit remains sharp: “O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!” In April, we launched the Public Domain Reading Club with this selection, republishing the original translation deemed too dangerous for 1917 America. As one modern critic noted, Lafargue “sounds like he’s constantly joking or being hyperbolic but he’s really barely joking” about how capitalists line their pockets while workers’ lives get “eaten up by these machines.”
The thing to talk about over your next power lunch:
Lists aren’t going anywhere. Long after the internet as we know it fades into obscurity, we'll still be organizing information into numbered sequences. But why do lists have such a hold on our culture?
There’s something fundamentally human about the listicle format. As linguist Arika Okrent observed more than a decade ago in The University of Chicago Magazine, lists give us “comfort in knowing ahead of time the configuration of the path you are about to go down and how you will get to the end, even if you have no idea what information you will gather along the way.”
The listicle works because it mirrors how language itself functions. “Thoughts come in layered clouds of impressions and ideas. Information is an undifferentiated pile, a mountain of facts and anecdotes. But when we speak or write, word must follow word, clause follow clause. Something has to come first, and something has to come after that.”
In other words, the list form does what all good writing does regardless of form: it takes chaos and makes it digestible. Lists aren’t inherently good or bad. They’re inherently human.
So, can’t we just enjoy a little writerly curation? Sure, as Kreizman wrote in the aforementioned LitHub column: “please, enjoy the summer reading lists that are beginning to crop up. Mark up your to-read list appropriately. But keep in mind that the titles you may see are not necessarily the best, or even the most anticipated. Unless media outlets follow such lists with in-depth book coverage, they mean next to nothing.”
And as algorithmic curation has gradually replaced many human-generated lists from Spotify playlists through to Netflix’s taste clusters, even the imperfect human lists feel like some kind of resistance.
And one more long thing to read:
Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed with the world, I pop into my local library. Or into an independent bookstore. I usually leave with a few more books, further adding to my backlog of partially completed “must read” new books. But what’s equally compelling to me is the lineage of our contemporary ideas, the pedigree of our problems. That’s the idea behind ESC KEY .CO’s new Public Domain Reading Club, where we’re sifting through the annals of work in the public domain and contextualizing compelling works that, sometimes unexpectedly, tell us something about our current affairs.
The first selection we unveiled in April is “The Right to Be Lazy.” (The second selection will be unveiled soon to subscribers.) For each selection, we’re running a briefing with relevant context alongside the original work in full, in its original form but formatted here to be easy to read.
Paul Lafargue
