three books dot net
As a moderate, semi-dangerous San Francisco liberal, The Ezra Klein Show is required listening. The Vox co-founder and New York Times opinion contributor brings on smart guests to talk about smart things. At the end of every episode Ezra asks his guests this question:
“What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?”
Every time I listen to the show I think to myself: “I should write these down! I’m always looking for good non-fiction books to read, and these seem interesting!” Now, the Times does the Right Thing by including all of those book recommendations in the RSS feed, and linking to them on their site. But I’m lazy, and I wanted them all in one place.
So I put them all in one place: 3books.net.
- Built with Claude Code, hosted on Vercel & Neon, with book data from ISBNdb.
- The system parses the RSS feed from the Times, and uses GPT 3.5 to pull out the recommended books, and write little bios of the guests. Stuffs all that into the database.
- It looks up the books in ISBNdb, grabs some metadata about the books, stuffs all that into the database.
- The system does the best it can to associate a single book across multiple episodes (The Origins of Totalitarianism has been recommended in seven episodes!).
- The processing isn’t perfect! Sometimes it will include a book written by the guest! I’m OK with that.
- The home page shows the books recommended in recent episodes (and skips any episodes that don’t have book recommendations), detail pages for books and episodes show, well, details.
- I’ve started doing some basic “recommended with:” pivots on books, so you can see what other books have been recommended alongside the one you’re currently viewing.
- Search sort of works! It’s not fancy.
- I like the “random book” and “random episode” features.
- The system currently has about 1300 books across nearly 500 episodes. I want to explore more ways to browse this corpus; it’s a tidy little dataset.
I like projects, I like books, I like podcasts, I like RSS feeds. I think I would like Ezra Klein! Seems like a nice guy. (Hmmm, is all of this just an extreme case of parasocial fan behavior? Yikes.)
And I love making software. Making software with Claude Code has been a very interesting experience. I’ve gone through all the usual ups and downs – the “holy shit it worked” moments, the “holy shit the robot is a f’ing idiot” moments, the “wow, you really are a stateless machine without any memory, aren’t you” moments. But it’s super fun and incredibly empowering to have what Josh Brake calls “an e-bike for the mind” at your beck and call.
The site isn’t perfect, and there’s still more that I want / need to do. But if it’s good enough to buy a domain name for, it’s good enough to share.
So, go. Browse. Find a good book to read! Let me know what you pick.