Essays I liked, Summer ‘26
A few recommendations and reviews of essays I’ve read lately
While dining, one makes the choice to commit fully to one plate — maybe a bit heavy, but decadent and wholly satisfying — or goes the route of various tastings, left wanting or grateful it’s over. Lately, as the chaos of summer drifts me away from the longer form, I’ve been picking up essays, slowly becoming my preferred form of non-fiction.
I’ve opted for a variety of worldview samples: from a ‘90s analysis on the decline of reading to an argument published last month about AI in philosophy writing. To share a few thoughts on my favorite essays I read this summer:
1. “Why Bother” by Jonathan Franzen (1996)
“I began to make unhelpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I’d read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live…a measure of the incompatibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life.”
I really enjoyed the framing of a phenomenon that’s well-acknowledged and known: why aren’t people reading anymore? Even though Franzen wrote this essay a couple of decades ago, he already began to see the slow unravelling of a reading-first culture: then, it was the creep of T.V.; today it’s mobile phones and addictive algorithms.
Relating to his own struggles as a writer, he bemoans how the “tyranny of the literal” replaces the imagination, how the consumer is beginning to prefer fast iteration cycles of products with marginal gains over the unchanged, slower economics of static, published work. He also delves into the archetypes of persistent readers in this newer age: the one who modeled from parents, the one who coveted reading with peers, and finally, the social isolate (ha). While not particularly revolutionary — and a topic that has been debated to the moon and back (bonus recommendation: I enjoyed Horowich’s End of Reading in the Atlantic) — Franzen plays with some interesting, yet incipient, ideas on what’s driving the decline of books in cultural significance.
2. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by Ursula Le Guin (1986)
“The proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."
The carrier bag theory was coined originally by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, who argued the first human invention was not a spear for hunting nor weapon for defense, but a container — the simple, underlooked tool that is the literal foundation for holding and gathering food, a “womb of things to be and tomb of things that were”. Le Guin then connects this subversive arc of prehistoric evolution to the purpose of fiction — not as a climactic action nor to prop up a hero, but rather as a collection of small, important things, the sediment of human connection, struggle, and experiences.
What poetry! As a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin, an author who is constantly playing with ideas in her sandbox of Why Are We The Way We Are, this essay also reveals her to be a talented anthropologist, humanist, and philosopher. She also wields her unique sense of humor — an acceptance of the absurd. The more I read Le Guin, the more I believe to be a good writer is to be immersed in many worlds of discipline.
3. “On Undoing Philosophy” by Lily Hu (2026)
“A philosophy whose cravings are not mine is philosophy whose satisfactions also cannot be mine.”
Hu, an assistant professor at Yale, poses the argument of AI use in a fairly gray area: philosophy writing. She disagrees with the notion that nonfiction writing should be styleless. Rather, the act of reading and writing should always be a practice of living up to one another, a mutual contract between reader and writer that only a “human cure” can be given to a “human sickness”. Hu doesn’t indict the use of AI in writing so much as she argues the importance of taking responsibility for writing, and thus, thinking.
As someone who is an AI power-user at work, yet never in my personal writing, I found Hu’s argument to be very lucid; giving voice to a feeling of wrongness that accompanies using AI for more theoretical writing, writing that leans on taste more than fact. There is no Luddite rage that often accompanies anti-AI thinkpieces; rather, this article is a measured, nuanced takedown of common arguments, with the purpose of raising questions about where AI use cases make less sense.
Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your recommendations for future reviews to come!