Building an AI reading companion

Listening to Adam Zamoyski’s Moscow 1812, I kept losing track of where I was in the story. I’d hit rewind a few times to remember what was happening and then keep listening. Eventually, I used Claude Code to build a companion for the book.

I gave it a PDF of the book and asked it to summarize each chapter into a series of events. The site displays these events, dates, and page reference numbers. If I'm confused on a plot point, I pull up the site to remind myself of the key context.

It also lays everything out on the map so you can see how the conflict unfolds. I found this handy for example in Chapter 5 when they're discussing how Napoleon is stockpiling supplies throughout Prussia.

The book companion was a one-shot AI project with a few follow-up tweaks to improve the formatting (e.g. the map sticks to the top of the chapter as you scroll). Here's the initial prompt:

I'm reading this book and want a helper website to remind me what's going on. Create a simple site that for each chapter has a bulleted list of key events (e.g. battles). Each event should be a short sentence, no flourish or embellishment. It can also optionally have a map showing 1 or more events.

You might be wondering about hallucinations. Did Claude BS and make up an event on page 286? To help prevent mistakes, I added an AI review pass that compares the extracted events against the book, including their page references. The review can still miss errors, but it gives me a chance to find and correct them.

Building the site helped test my understanding of the story and keep some of the interesting details fresh in my mind. I'll probably build another for the next dense nonfiction book I read.