Making a case for an ‘antilibrary’: The joy of a huge pile of unread books
BENGALURU: My personal library has around 3,000 books. Most of my friends love to spend time in my office-cum-library when they visit me. The most oft-asked question is: “How many of these books have you read?” Building a library is not an ego-boosting exercise but a research tool I use for most of the books and columns I write. Hence, I have come to realize that ‘read’ books are far less valuable than ‘unread’ ones. In fact, I have started giving away my read books, unless they are a collectible or have a personal association.
In the book Black Swan, Nassim Taleb claims that your personal library should contain as many books as your finances allow. He writes, “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. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.” In effect, Taleb is saying that over time the ratio of library (existing knowledge) to antilibrary (potential of unlearned knowledge) should decrease over time – which perhaps runs counter to conventional wisdom.
Interestingly, there is a term for this in Japanese, ‘Tsundoku’, for leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books. Above is my recreation of an illustration by Ella Frances Sanders that I could relate to (from Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World).
A good library should always have more books than you need or have use for – that’s how you know a library is comprehensive. Also, why can’t your library or collection also reflect the interests of your friends or family? Why should it be stocked with only the books you care for – why not books for the times when friends drop in wanting to borrow a book?
Italian novelist Umberto Eco who had a personal library of over 30,000 books wrote an essay on How to Justify a Private Library. Eco points out that many people “consider a bookshelf as mere storage for already-read books”. But there is no need to waste valuable space on what you already know; it is better suited for what you want to learn. Or as Eco wittily answers when asked about his bookshelf:
“No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.”
So many book lovers have spoken of a time when a book that had remained unread on the shelf for years suddenly took on new and urgent importance. You become interested in a topic that you previously had no interest in, and then remember you’ve had a book on this very subject in your collection that you had ignored until now. This happened to me very recently. I had bought Loafing Along Death Valley Trails by William Caruthers during one of my road trips a few years back and never bothered to read it until recently when I planned a vacation to Death Valley!
Kevin Mims, who works in a bookstore, wrote a wonderful piece in the New York Times about why Taleb’s ‘antilibrary’ does not appeal to him: It fails to describe his library. He moots the idea of “the partially read book” rather than the unread book. He points out (and it’s true for many avid readers) that there are so many books we never complete, and so many that are not meant to be completed. What he describes is especially true for nonfiction:
We read a few chapters and feel we have read enough about a subject. Or take the anthology: poetry, essays, short stories. Do we usually read every story or poem or essay? No. We read what we are drawn to.Mims calls this “the twilight zone of the partially read”. He notes: “Nor do I typically read biographies all the way through. Biographers have a tendency to shoehorn every last tidbit of information they can into their books.
I don’t really care about the marks that Ogden Nash received on his third-grade report card or how many trunks of clothing Edith Wharton had shipped across the Atlantic when she moved to France. There are probably hundreds of biographies in my personal library. I have read parts of most of them, but I have read very few in their entirety. The same is true of collections of letters…the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.”
Another interesting angle to having an antilibrary was provided by Jessica Stillman in her article, where she believes that an antilibrary can act as a counter to the Dunning-Kruger effect – a cognitive bias that leads ignorant people to assume their knowledge or abilities are more proficient than they truly are. Since people are not prone to enjoying reminders of their ignorance, their unread books push them toward — if not mastery, at least an ever-expanding understanding of competence. Stillman writes, “All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other people.”The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley, who is gently mad about books.