I had a free Saturday and wanted to do something fun with code. What started as "can we make a bookshelf?" turned into a full-blown interactive experience — pixel clouds, jazz piano, glitter sparkles, and 24 books on a shelf. All built with Claude in one sitting.
Here's exactly how it went down.
Nothing is original. Every creative thing you've ever loved was built on something that came before it.
I saw this Colophon x Monotype bookshelf design floating around Pinterest — books standing upright with different colored spines, each showing the typeface name. It looked gorgeous. I saved it and moved on. Then on a Saturday, the thought hit me: what if I could do this with my actual Goodreads books?
Inspiration from Pinterest
That's how remixes start. You see something, it sits in your brain, and one day it collides with your own context. The Colophon design was about typefaces. Mine became about the 24 books I read in 2025 — with jazz piano, pixel clouds, and Eiffel Tower sparkles bolted on top. Same DNA, completely different thing.
The pixel clouds? Inspired by retro 8-bit game skies. The sparkle effect? The Eiffel Tower's hourly light show. The jazz piano? Murakami's obsession with Bill Evans. Each layer was a remix of something I'd absorbed from somewhere else.
That's the whole point. Take something you love, make it yours, add your weird, and ship it.
So I opened Claude and said: "Can we connect my Goodreads and create a bookshelf design like this? With React?"
That's literally how this started.
First preview
Claude pulled my 2025 reading list from Goodreads — 24 books total. Each book came with title, author, page count, and my rating. The page count became important later because I used it to determine the thickness of each spine (more pages = wider spine). Small detail, but it makes the shelf feel real.
The 24 books:
The Creative Act, No More Mr. Nice Guy, Yellowface, The Silent Patient, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Gentleman From Peru, The Book Of Clarity, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ghachar Ghochar, Tiny Experiments, Piranesi, White Nights, V for Vendetta, Of Mice and Men, The Housekeeper and the Professor, The Memory Police, Hatching Twitter, The Fall, Holes, Black Edge, Company Of One, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, The Housemaid's Secret.