Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell argues that generative AI poses serious risks to children’s learning, independence and happiness, including reduced cognitive effort, weaker reading and writing skills, dependence on automated answers, and exposure to manipulative human-like chatbots. She also condemns AI’s links to disinformation, surveillance, autonomous weapons, inequality and environmental damage, while acknowledging potential benefits in medicine, accessibility and disaster response. Rundell opposes making AI central to childhood education, warning that wealthier schools may restrict its use while poorer schools become more dependent on it. She calls instead for sustained reading, writing, humanities education and intellectual struggle as foundations for human freedom and democratic resistance.

Katherine Rundell discusses the sharp decline in reading books for pleasure, including her own struggle to maintain attention amid constant digital distractions. She describes using a device that disables smartphone functions, a locked box and disconnected internet to protect reading time, and considers what society loses when reading declines and how people might rediscover the habit.

Twenty literary figures recommend books for summer reading, spanning contemporary fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, history and social criticism. Recurring choices include Helen Garner’s collected diaries, Torrey Peters’s Stag Dance, Frances Wilson’s biography of Muriel Spark, and several works addressing trauma, gender, race, migration, free speech and human rights. The recommendations range from accessible holiday reading to politically engaged works on abolition, women’s suffrage, fascism, colonialism and Gaza.

Thirteen writers share intensely personal journeys to lesser-known European sites connected with art, architecture, literature, music and cinema. Destinations include Château La Coste in Provence, the Sad Hill Cemetery filming location in northern Spain, hidden Caravaggio paintings in Rome, David Bowie’s former Berlin neighbourhood, William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Spinalonga in Crete, Chagall’s stained-glass church in Kent, Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence, John Donne’s portrait in London, Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths in Switzerland, Alberto Burri’s memorial at Gibellina and the Ghent Altarpiece in Belgium. The accounts emphasize the emotional power of visiting places that bring artistic, literary and historical works vividly into the physical world, while also providing practical access and travel details for several attractions.

Authors, critics and Guardian readers recommend books they enjoyed in November. Katherine Rundell praises John Vaillant’s Fire Weather for its vivid account of the Fort McMurray wildfire and its warning about climate change. Other contributors recommend Jen Beagin’s comic Big Swiss, Mike McCormack’s unsettling This Plague of Souls and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s darkly humorous My Sister, the Serial Killer. John Self also highlights the comic and intellectually playful novels of Iris Murdoch and Michael Frayn.