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If you pick up this month's Virginia Living Magazine, you'll find my face smiling back at you. A lovely little profile by Amy Brecount White.

Try to keep up, AI. This is what reality looks like.

I wrote this novel as Anthropic was settling the case with the authors they pirated to train their LLM (me among them). What is my opinion of AI for novel-writing? I won't be replaced; I'll keep changing my game; I'll go where AI can only follow, again and again and again.

My next novel comes out in '27, and one of the early readers of the finished book told me: "with all the discussions about AI replacing human creativity, you are proving that there is no match to a human mind, with plot, twists, sentence structure, descriptions, everything!"

As the world grapples with AI and the fate of humanity, I choose to dig into the real world, things that take time, that are real. A cello etude requires my undivided attention to learn: no matter how much Anthropic scrapes data from other cellists, there is no shortcut for me training MY hands.

what are you looking at? My view for several hours a day: a cello and some dogs and cats. Increasingly, my life is at once more interesting to me and less optimized for social media posts.

Goats! Not mine (mine have grown so regrettably elderly). Spent an enjoyably informative day at a grazing tech workshop put on by American Farmland Trust and the VA Coop Extension (these are very cheap educational opportunities, if, like Ronan Lynch, you were ever thinking of being a farmer).

I don't care if you're a graphic novel person or not—if you are a person who enjoys intentionally crafted prose novels that do a lot of work between the words, you'll like this. When it first came out I bought a bunch of copies to gift and I can feel the impulse returning.

I love this book, so, so much. It's been four years since I read IN by Will McPhail, but I just reread it and discovered, if possible, I love it more. McPhail's intricate character development and insanely specific use of gesture makes the humor and the sadness and the revelation sing.

I have been moving this old pony drawing of mine around & around my house ever since I found it tucked in a copy of THE SCORPIO RACES, trying to keep it from getting crumpled, so this is me saying: comment with a favorite part from THE SCORPIO RACES and I'll pick someone on Monday to get this thing.

I liked reading about the things I had read and I liked reading about the things that I hadn't. It's a succinct, conversational cultural study, an excuse to think about words. Recommend.

We travel from Dante to Chabon, the Gnostic Gospels to Beano, Leibowitz to Little Richard. I'll cop that I'm no expert Bowie fan, and also, that I didn't always agree with O'Connell's takes, but I enjoyed every page. O'Connell's writing goes down easy, and every essay is just a few pages long.

Ostensibly, BOWIE'S BOOKSHELF is a deep dive into the selections on the list: why Bowie chose them, how they might have influenced him. Practically, however, it's a marvelous frolic through all the things books can be, constrained by and filtered through the lens of Bowie's life and career.

Simply: a pleasure. In 2013, David Bowie posted a list of 100 must-read books on his Facebook. He had plenty to choose from. He was a voracious reader and, according to O'Connell, had a portable library of fifteen hundred books that he brought on tour and to set with him.

happy birthday!