I had a great experience recently in using AI, specifically Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.6, to recommend my next set of books. I simply provided an image of my bookshelf and the following prompt:

The attached image is a bookshelf. First, list the books depicted. Next, based on that list, provide ten recommendations that belong to the <insert genre here> genre.

Why list the books first? The idea is to force the names of the books into the model’s context and maximize the probability they form the basis for the recommendations.

For my first prompt, I used adventure as the genre and it provided a few excellent recommendations, two of which I’ll mention:

1. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage - This book, written in 1959 by Alfred Lansing, was the #2 recommendation. In fact, I had just borrowed this from the library and loved it. Its presence at the top of the list gave me confidence in the other recommendations.
2. River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard - I took this suggestion and bought the book. Like Endurance, describing it as a gripping and incredible tale of adventure and survival would be an understatement. I highly recommend.

For my next prompt, I used biotech as the genre. The first ten were too heavy on gene editing and synthetic biology for my mood, so I responded:

Ten more please, but none related to synthetic biology or gene editing.

The resulting list had a couple that caught my eye:

1. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - I took this suggestion and read the book. It was so evocative that I remained in a relatively bad mood for days, torn by the utter inhumanity and selfishness that gave rise to the opioid crisis. There is much in the book that elicits disgust; I particularly felt the stain on the pharmaceutical industry, where in sharp contrast to what is described, myself and so many I personally know are working to genuinely improve the human condition. Biology can be devastatingly cruel and so many require our help.
2. The Great American Drug Deal: A New Prescription for Innovative and Affordable Medicines by Peter Kolchinsky - this will be my next read and I look forward to the deep web of complexity that is drug pricing.

What do you think? Did I miss anything? Contact me!

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Tags: AI biotech

This work by Derek Croote is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0