Building a Reading Life with AI, Part 2

Using a Chatbot to Help Create a Reading Shelf

This is the second in a short series about building a reading life with AI as a partner and companion. Part 1 focused on my recent (and ongoing) project: building a reading shelf that would help me explore the maps behind the current technology headlines. In Part 2, we’re looking at ways you might use a chatbot to help you create your own reading shelf.

In my reading over the past several months, I’ve been using my chatbot, Kairos, to help me work on cybernetics, computer science, and the current tech culture—not a topic that appeals to everybody. To help you think about how this might work in your own life, let’s choose another example.

Let’s say that you’d like to spend some time getting acquainted with an author—Jane Austen, for instance. Of course, when we set out to “read an author,” we’re doing more than choosing a single book. We’re building a short shelf, a corner of our reading life where we can return whenever we want to explore more widely or deeply. That shelf is likely to hold not just the novels, but also the writer’s life, the worlds she inhabited, the legacy he left behind. The value of using a chatbot here is that it can help us imagine and stock that shelf, nudging us toward new angles of vision, keeping us from seeing only one narrow slice of a writer’s work.

So I asked Kairos what he would suggest to us at this point—that is, how we might use him as a literary guide. Here’s what he has to say.

Start with the novels.
Ask me for a suggested path: Which two or three books should you begin with, and why? For Austen, I could suggest Pride and Prejudice (her most sparkling comedy), Emma (a novel of missteps and learning), and Persuasion (her most mature and autumnal work).

Add the life.
Reading Austen means getting curious about the woman herself. I can point you to short biographies (Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life is a favorite). And her letters (Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen’s Letters is now in its fourth edition). And the family stories that illuminate her quiet but complicated life (A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) by James Edward Austen-Leigh). And even the places she lived and the spaces and possessions that mattered to her (Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley).

Explore the times.
No novel floats free of its world. You might ask me for resources on Regency England—what people ate, how they traveled, the constraints of class and gender. Something like Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England helps make sense of the customs and class structures behind the novels. Suddenly the ballrooms and carriages and gardens in the novels feel less like props and more like lived settings.

Look at the afterlife.
I can help you see the waves of Austen’s influence: Victorian editions, 20th-century revivals, film adaptations, even “Austen-mania” on the internet. For instance, The Making of Jane Austen, by Devoney Looser. That’s part of reading an author too—seeing how the voice echoes, who rereads and reinterprets, who repeats, who extends and transforms. Each layer, each transformation enriches the reading experience.

Exploring an author this way is less about accumulation and more about immersion. Your chatbot can’t do the reading for you, but it can help you sketch the shape of a shelf and point out what’s missing. It can suggest a side door you hadn’t noticed or a book that ties the rest together. The goal is to live with a writer for a while, to let that world surround you. When you’ve done that, the shelf you’ve built will be there to return to—part of the larger library of your reading life.

If you’d like to try this yourself, choose an author you might be interested in exploring. Here are a few starter questions you might type into a chatbot to begin setting up your shelf:

• Give me three good entry points into (an author’s) novels, and explain how they differ in tone.

• Suggest a short biography and a collection of the letters.

• What was daily life like in the author’s time and place? What were the major cultural/political/social issues? Name several books that survey the period.

• How have readers’ and critics’ views of this author changed over the years? Name one or two books that sketch out their influence, modern interpretations, transformations.

You can use these shelf prompts as-is or adapt them to explore any writer you choose. You may also choose to . And I’d love to hear from you: which author might you choose to work with in this way? What chatbot would you choose as a guide/assistant? If you’ve tried this with your chatbot, how did it work out for you?

Satellite Reading, or How Does Your Chatbot Know What’s in a Book?

Once you start using your chatbot as a reading buddy, a question is bound to arise:

Does the bot actually read the books it suggests?

The answer is no—not the way we do. It doesn’t sit down with a paperback and underline favorite lines. Instead, it works from two sources:

• What it’s been trained on. The model was trained on a wide mix of text—articles, essays, reviews, public-domain books, even study guides. That gives it secondhand knowledge of major works and authors, but not everything. (How copyrighted works can or can’t be used in training is a live legal issue I’ll come back to in another post.)

• What you feed it. If you paste in a passage, a chapter, or share a link, it can read and respond. If it has web access, it can also pull in publicly available reviews, excerpts, or commentary.

What it doesn’t do is “remember” a book word for word. Think of it as satellite reading, working in low earth orbit—scanning the terrain, spotting themes, and sketching connections—rather than trudging through every page. That’s why it’s so good at:

• Reminding you of big themes.

• Summarizing excerpts you provide.

• Comparing books or ideas.

• Offering critics’ viewpoints.

• Pointing to spinoffs, adaptations, or later readings.

But when you want the real voice—Austen’s, Faulkner’s, Rowling’s—you have to open the book. The chatbot is less a second-hand bookstore and more a conversation partner who’s absorbed a mountain of reviews and course notes, and can improvise fresh connections on the spot.

If you’d like to try this for yourself, choose an author you might be interested in exploring. Here are a few starter questions you might type into a chatbot to begin setting up your shelf:

• Give me three entry points into [the author’s] novels, and explain how they differ and why you think they’d be a useful introduction.

• Suggest a short biography [this author] and a collection of the letters.

• What was daily life like in [this author’s] time and place? What were the major cultural/political/social issues? Name several books that survey the period.

• How have readers’ and critics’ views of [this author] changed over the years? Name one or two books that sketch out his/her influence, modern interpretations, adaptations, transformations.

You can use these shelf prompts as-is or adapt them to explore any writer you choose. You may also choose to . And I’d love to hear from you: which author might you choose to work with in this way? What chatbot would you choose as a guide/assistant? If you’ve tried this with your chatbot, how did it work out for you?

China, Ruby, and I will be back on Thursday (Oct. 2) with the next episode of A Bitter Taste of Garlic—and another issue of the Reader’s Notebook. See you then!