Being anti- sometimes means being a counterpart.
Recently, I was asked how many books I read every year. I usually deflect this question and come up with an answer like, “I don’t know, but I do know how many more I want to read.” I see this as a vanity metric, and I’m unsure why I would measure it. So, I tend to focus more on things that matter to me, and concerning books read, it might be the total number of books in my private library.
Italian philosopher Umberto Eco .... is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know .... You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
(from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan)
A bigger frame of mind.
I do like this frame of thinking. Given that we’ve recently arrived at the beginning of a new year, an event that inevitably imbues our culture with talk of reinvention and self-improvement, it seems an opportune time to look a little closer at this under-appreciated idea.
- Seeing how much more there is to know, learn, forget, and learn again is humbling. In these times when speed is incentivized, we tend to research a subject in more than one book. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we can see that most people are comfortable in their ignorance and hostile to anyone who points it out. So let’s have something independent, static, that shows us that we still have so much to learn.
- It also illustrates the cost of opportunity when choosing the next book to read. You are saying “NO” to all the other books in your antilibrary by saying “YES” to one. This makes you more intentional when picking and dropping a book. It might sound so basic, but did you think of it the last time you said YES to something?
- You can’t read all the books in there. It is expected to feel sad, guilty, or even happy knowing that so many things in this world will be left unchecked. But it would help if you directed those emotions in picking the right book next time. You can select great books if you know why the selection is essential!
- It is also a good introspection tool. Your tastes do change with time. That is both normal and expected. Checking what and when you added in your antilibrary should give some insights like
- Which subjects should you read but skip, and how often? Are you prepared enough in that domain, or are you just too confident?
- What subjects always skip your antilibrary and go directly to your library? This is another way to confirm your favorite authors or domains.
- How extensive is the to-read list versus the read list? Am I exploring enough subjects and getting enough recommendations from friends?
- Do I have books that I read already but want to move to the antilibrary? Do I do this often with some specific books?
- It’s easy to go to a random book, open a random chapter, and see what exciting things you can find hidden there. Become accustomed to the material, know why it’s part of your antilibrary and then see what you want to do with the book - should it be a next-read or maybe later?
And to read, we shall.
Some notes from me on how I read books:
