# Reading across books with Claude Code | Pieter Maes

<https://pieterma.es/syntopic-reading-claude/>

- Host: [pieterma.es](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/pieterma.es/)
- Saved: January 14, 2026 (2026-01-14T13:59:13Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/97f679954457/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/97f679954457.json

## What Jamie wrote

Reading [How to Read a Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book) was my first exposure to the concept of [Syntopic Reading](https://leticiamooney.com/2019/04/syntopic-reading-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it/):

> When you're reading at the Syntopic level, you're working to synthesise material across a discipline (most of the time). Syntopic reading itself has five levels, requires a different approach to inspection, and is the point at which you make the authors work for _you_ rather than you interpreting _them_.

This article explores using Claude Code to assist in syntopic reading across a collection of books. It would be interesting to build a librarian like agent capability like this, that could hold broad conversations across a variety of books you've read as well as extending into ones that are adjacent. This is from the same person that created the [Hacker News Book Map](https://hnbooks.pieterma.es).

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT337: Weekly Thing 337 / Sunrise, Vision, Offline](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/337/), Notable

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- [Hacker News Book Map](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/678a90c5d7c2/) (hnbooks.pieterma.es, January 14, 2026)

## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://pieterma.es/syntopic-reading-claude/