Reading in the Age of AI: Fiction, Imagination, and What Makes Us Human
by Librarian Lynn Lampert, Coordinator of Instruction & Information Literacy - July 14, 2026
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly capable of processing vast libraries of books, articles, and conversations, an intriguing question emerges: what does it mean for AI to "read"? Large language models can recognize patterns across enormous amounts of text, summarize information, answer questions, and generate remarkably fluent responses. Yet this kind of language processing differs fundamentally from human reading. People do more than decode words, we interpret them through the lens of memory, emotion, lived experience, cultural context, and imagination. Reading, and especially reading fiction for leisure reading, invites us to inhabit other perspectives, wrestle with ambiguity, infer motives that are never fully stated, and reflect on questions that rarely have simple answers. While AI can model linguistic patterns and produce compelling interpretations, it does not engage with stories through subjective experiences or conscious reflection in the ways that human readers do.
This distinction helps explain why reading remains especially valuable in an age of AI. As linguist Naomi S. Baron argues in her new book Reader, Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters (now on the shelves of our Gohstand Reading Room) understanding how AI processes text also sharpens our understanding of what is distinctive about human reading: our ability to make meaning through experience, judgment, imagination, and interpretation. Rather than diminishing the value of reading, the rise of AI underscores why these human capacities matter. To learn more about Professor Baron’s book and research, listen to a podcast talk she gave about her book for The Academic Minute.
Many of The Book Drop's featured novels for this post, such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me, explore artificial intelligence not as a technological novelty but as a lens through which to examine human consciousness, empathy, love, morality, and vulnerability. Both novels feature AI companions whose interactions with people illuminate human strengths and frailties, causing readers to consider not only what AI companion robots might become, but also what makes us human in the first place.
Reading any of the recommended novels, listed below, is an act of human interpretation rather than information consumption. These novels each encourage readers to question assumptions, imagine alternative futures, and reflect on how emerging technologies may reshape relationships, identity, and society. At a time when AI systems can analyze and generate text at unprecedented speed and scale, fiction and particularly leisure reading offer something equally important but fundamentally different: the opportunity to slow down, engage deeply with complexity, and cultivate empathy, creativity, and self-understanding. In an AI rich world, reading fiction for pleasure is more than an escape, it is a uniquely human practice that strengthens our capacities for imagination, critical reflection, and emotional insight that enriches our lives and helps us better understand ourselves and one another. The Book Drop recommends the following novels that, through the lens of speculative fiction, explore the roles of artificial intelligence, the nature of human consciousness, and examine how advanced technology may impact human relationships, society, and morality.
Who Knows You by Heart by Christopher Farley
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PS3556.A7165 W48 2025
Summary: "Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what's real in an age of artificial intelligence"-- Provided by publisher.
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PR6063.C4 M33 2019
Summary: In an alternative 1980s London, Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret.
When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong, and clever -- a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart?
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PR6059.S5 K57 2021
Summary: "From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?"--Provided by publisher
“Klara and the Sun explores artificial intelligence through Klara, an Artificial Friend who provides insights into a technologically advanced future and human nature. Kazuo Ishiguro uses Klara's perspective to examine the ethical and emotional dimensions of AI. Klara's ability to observe and empathize demonstrates AI's potential to mimic human emotions. Her interactions with characters like Josie highlight the vulnerabilities and complexities of human emotions, raising questions about the distinction between human and machine” (Audible Blog Summary).
Frankissstein: A Love Story by Jeanette Winterson
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PR6073.I558 F73 2019
Summary: "Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead ... but waiting to return to life. What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself"-- Provided by publisher
The Dream Hotel: A Novel by Laila Lalami
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PS3612.A543 D74 2025
Summary: "Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom"--Provided by publisher.
The Circle by Dave Eggers
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PS3605.G48 C57 2013
Summary: "The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge"-- Provided by publisher.
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PS3569.T3868 F35 2019
Summary: "In his youth, Richard "Dodge" Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia. One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge's family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived. In the coming years, technology allows Dodge's brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife -- the Bitworld -- is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls. But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem ..."--Provided by publisher
Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; PS3566.O92 P53 2024
Summary: "Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can." -- Book jacket.
Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters by Naomi Baron
Location: Gohstand Reading Room; Z1033.E43 B373 2026
Summary: "In this brilliant, expansive, and entertaining book, Baron helps us appreciate the power and promise of AI while providing a stirring defense of reading for its own rewards and pleasures. Read this important book before AI does it for you."
—Will Schwalbe, author of Books for Living
"What happens to human reading when AI bots can do it for us? Explosive developments in artificial intelligence have awed everyday users with the technology's ability to draw, do computer coding, and especially to write. Those AI-generated essays and poems, legal briefs and responses to requests for information are all visible evidence of large language models at work. What we don't see is the critical prior step: before it can write, AI needs to read. While AI's written outcomes are remarkably similar to what a diligent student, lawyer, or researcher might produce, AI doesn't read the way that humans do. Now that AI is proving an adept reader, what happens to our own reading skills and motivations - especially at a time when both voluntary and school reading are increasingly on the decline? We have learned that when we let chatbots write for us, there are pros and cons to handing over our virtual pens. It's critical that we also think through the consequences of relinquishing reading - a deeply human activity - to bots. What do we stand to gain and lose when we let AI read for us? Tracing the intersecting trajectories of AI and reading, Reader Bot tackles this vital question, revealing why we must be thoughtful about how we welcome AI-as-reader into our lives" - Naomi Baron