GoKawiilMy first year of college, I had a work-study job which ended up being one of the most sneakily important intellectual experiences of my life. I was a lowly library shelver, assigned to the shelves labelled A through F section in the Library of Congress filing system: mostly works on religion, philosophy, sociology, and history. I say sneakily important because at first glance, shelving books in a library is super boring. What it amounts to, physically, is reading the label on a book, then placing it on the shelf where it belongs, repeated around a thousand times per shift.
To avoid the tedium, I decided that I would also flip to a random page of every book I shelved and read a random sentence from it. Usually, I would stop there — running aground on some passage by a Hungarian classical music critic or a long-dead statistician of Bolivia’s agricultural development or any number of other things that failed to catch my interest. But other times — like when I came across a book about Hellenistic mystery cults, or The Education of Henry Adams, or Are Clothes Modern?— I would become so absorbed that I’d make my way through several pages before reluctantly depositing the book back where it belonged.
And then, very often, I’d do the same with the books on either side of the one I’d liked.
GR 830, v through w: the vampire/werewolf section of Columbia’s Butler Library.
In retrospect, I learned more at this job than in any formal class I’ve ever taken, because it was a filtered form of auto-didacticism. The Library of Congress classification system — and the expert staff of an academic research library — had already sorted and filtered these texts. Not to mention the selection mechanism of the fact that that they had been checked out: had, in other words, found a lasting readership. Thus I was not seeing a truly haphazard sampling of books, but a targeted, organized, yet still interestingly randomized sampling of good books.
Today, undergraduate students will invariably search on Google when asked to find a source, and the results are so much worse than the old method of going to, say, the GR 830 shelf of a research library (basically, “books that the Ghostbusters would read”) and just looking around.
But honestly, even research libraries are not what they used to be. I am 41, and I feel like I’ve lived through the peak, and now the decline, of what libraries can be (I still love them, of course — in fact I’m currently writing this in the genealogy section of the Santa Cruz Public Library). The browsable open stacks of old are being replaced by Learning Labs and Digital Innovation Hubs and seating areas devoted mostly to socializing and snacking, and increasingly, the delightful, weird old books that I had the opportunity to browse as an undergrad are heading to dumpsters, replaced by e-editions.
But one thing that has remained consistently good throughout my life is the books themselves — non-fiction books, I mean. Even now, as readership of non-fiction declines amid competition from AI chatbots and podcasts, I feel like we are living through a golden age of the form that rarely gets recognized as such.
The Book Prize Index
Which is why I set aside some time this summer to create — or, rather, induce Claude Code to create — a free platform for searching in the long tail of high-quality non-fiction books. Quality is difficult to define, but it’s been my experience that books that win or achieve the short-list of the major non-fiction prizes are almost always noticeably good, so that was the litmus test I used. To get started, I counted up all the major non-fiction prizes in the English language. Then I had Claude and GPT-5.6 gather the lists of finalists and winners from various online sources (mostly Wikipedia) and arrange it into a searchable, sortable list.
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