Reading across books with Claude Code | Pieter Maes

Reading How to Read a Book was my first exposure to the concept of Syntopic Reading:

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.