I own a lot of books I haven’t read. Many I’ve left in various stages of “read-ness”, some I’ve barely started, and a very few I haven’t opened since I bought them months (years?) ago. A quick glance at my shelves yields an estimate of the ratio of read to unread books of approximately 1:1 — meaning, of the books I currently own, I have as many yet to read as I’ve already read. I have to admit that the thought gives me a thrill — so many new books to dip into when I have a moment, not to mention books to revisit. Alas, not everyone in my family feels the same way.
In my defense, I believe I’m in good company. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposes the “anti-library”: the notion that the unread books one owns are more valuable than those that have been read, if only because the unread books incessantly and “menacingly” point out the depth (and breadth) of one’s ignorance. The anti-library is an inoculation against intellectual hubris.
Taleb gives the example of author Umberto Eco, who he reports has a personal library of more than 30,000 tomes, many of which Eco claims remain unread. (Eco’s website mentions a second library of 20,000 volumes.) My much more modest collection occupies 32 linear feet of space on four bookshelves in one corner of the apartment. At approximately one book per inch, that comes to 400 books total, or more than two orders of magnitude fewer than Eco. Seems about right for now.
Needless to say, my wife isn’t convinced of my need for an anti-library. Why not just read the books I have before getting more? In the spirit of domestic harmony (with a side benefit of financial responsibility?), I vowed at the end of 2012 to buy no new books until I had significantly decreased the number of unread books in my possession.
I of course did the easy things first. I sold some books I had already finished but didn’t want to read again, which reduced the total number of books I own. (Bad from my perspective, good for domestic harmony.) Next I procrastinated by going to the library and reading two or three forgettable books on personal finance. Then I re-read a few of the books I already own: Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, Le Carre’s Mission Song (a Bildungsroman of “your top interpreter”), and Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and The Consolations of Philosophy; I also meandered through bits of Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (a fantastic book on the history and culture of walking).
Finally to the unread pile. Over the summer I got about halfway through Shogun, and most of the way through Jay Rubin’s translation of Rashomon. Then for my day job I read Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, which traces the origins of the changes happening in the energy industry. Truly fascinating, but also deeply sobering, given the historical pace of technological change in the industry compared with the pace at which many people want the industry to change.
Then one morning as I was eating my eggs, I picked up A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson’s hilarious survey of the history of Western science and the people who made it. Leaving my breakfast half-finished, I had one of my “I love science!” moments. Bryson’s book brims with ideas and historical figures that beg to be further investigated — Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Richard Feynman, Timothy Flannery, Stephen Jay Gould — and that is only one section of the bibliography. (More on the book in my next post.)
So let’s say I’ve moved three formerly “unread” books to the “read” pile. It is clear that, no matter the short-term implications of my current enthusiasm for reading my unread books, in the long-term my anti-library will likely only grow. Apologies to my wife.
Zatsudon 