From empty bookshelf to profitable side project in 30 days

Last month, I took every book I’ve read off my bookshelf, put them into a black bag, and gave them all to a local charity shop.

Photo by Mushvig Niftaliyev on Unsplash

Then, I opened a mega To Read list I keep in Apple Notes and ordered a few hundred dollars’ worth of books from Amazon. I mainly bought non-fiction, memoirs, and philosophy books.

I enjoy tracking what I’ve read and what I want to read. Seeing a bookshelf full of unread books is far more likely to convince me to put away my phone and read an actual book versus doomscroll on X.

That said, what’s the point in reading dozens of books if I don’t actually take ideas from them and put them to good use?

I also always enjoy reading other people’s reading lists, so I wanted to share mine… in an unusual way.

Looking at my mega list of books I’ve read and To Read prompted me to work on a new vibe coding project: Reading Curator.

It was a fun, creative project.

I worked on it during the white space I set aside each day for writing or building.

I built it using Cursor AI. It’s not just a standard content site, though. It’s an AI-powered book discovery…