I love books. if I go to the bookstore to see the price, I come out with three books that I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy secondhand books by the bag at the library friends sale, explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. even the smell of books catches me, that faint earthy vanilla scent that hits you when you turn a page.
The problem is that my habit of buying books outstrips my ability to read them. this leads to fomo and occasional pangs of guilt over unread volumes spilling onto my shelves. sound familiar?
You are reading: Buying too many books
but this blame may be completely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an “anti-library,” and he believes that our anti-libraries are not signs of intellectual failure. just the opposite.
living with an anti-library
taleb expounded on the concept of the anti-library in his best-selling book, black swan: the shock of the highly improbable. It begins with a discussion of the prolific author and scholar Umberto Eco, whose personal library housed a staggering 30,000 books.
When echo hosted visitors, many marveled at the size of its library and assumed it represented the host’s knowledge, which, make no mistake, was expansive. but some clever visitors realized the truth: the echo library was not voluminous because he had read a lot; it was voluminous because he wanted to read much more.
echo said so much. doing a calculation on the back of the envelope, he discovered that he could only read about 25,200 books if he read one book a day, every day, between the ages of ten and eighty. a “trifle”, he laments it, compared to the million books available in any good library.
based on the echo example, taleb deduces:
read books are much less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put in there. You’ll accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the increasing number of unread books on the shelves will glare at you. in fact, the more you know, the bigger the rows of unread books. let’s call this collection of unread books an anti-library. [emphasis in original]
maria popova, whose post in brain pickings beautifully sums up taleb’s argument, points out that our tendency is to overestimate the value of what we know, while underestimating the value of what we don’t know. taleb’s anti-library turns this trend on its head.
The value of the anti-library stems from how it challenges our self-esteem by providing a constant and unsettling reminder of all that we don’t know. the titles lining my own house remind me that i know little to nothing about cryptography, the evolution of feathers, italian folklore, illicit drug use in the third reich, and whatnot entomophagy. (don’t spoil it, I want you to surprise me).
“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended,” Taleb writes. “It is an ornament that allows us to ascend in the hierarchical order. so this tendency to offend the sensibility of the echo library by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations.”
These selves of uncharted ideas drive us to keep reading, keep learning, and never feel comfortable knowing enough. Jessica Stillman calls this understanding intellectual humility.
People who lack this intellectual humility (those who don’t yearn to purchase new books or visit their local library) may enjoy a sense of pride in having conquered their personal collection, but that library provides all the use of a mounted library on the wall. trophy. it becomes an “ego boot appendage” just for decoration. it’s not a living, growing resource that we can learn from until we’re in our 80s and, if we’re lucky, a few more.
tsundoku
I love the concept of taleb, but I have to admit I find the “anti-library” tag a bit lacking. To me, it sounds like a plot device in a dan brown copycat novel: “quick! we have to stop the illuminati before they use the anti-library to erase all the books in existence.”
writing for the new york times, kevin mims doesn’t mind taleb’s label either. Fortunately, her objection is a bit more practical: “I really don’t like taleb’s term ‘anti-library’. A library is a collection of books, many of which remain unread for long periods of time. I don’t see how it’s different from an anti-library.”
See Also: 5 Baby Books That Teach Them to Love Reading – Motherly
Her preferred tag is a loan from Japan: tsundoku. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books that you have bought but not read. its morphology combines tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dukosho (reading books).
The word originated in the late 19th century as a satirical jab at teachers who had books but didn’t read them. While that is the opposite of the point of taleb, today the word does not carry any stigma in Japanese culture. it also differs from bibliomania, which is the obsessive collecting of books for the sake of the collection, not for the final reading.
the value of tsundoku
OK, I’m sure there are some swaggering bibliomaniacs out there who own a collection comparable to a small national library, but rarely rip a cover. Still, studies have shown that book ownership and reading often go together to great effect.
one of these studies found that children who grew up in homes with between 80 and 350 books showed better literacy, numeracy, and information and communication technology skills as adults. exposure to books, the researchers suggested, enhances these cognitive abilities by making reading part of life’s routines and practices.
Many other studies have shown that reading habits convey a host of benefits. suggest that reading can reduce stress, satisfy the need for social connection, reinforce social skills and empathy, and enhance certain cognitive abilities. And that’s just fiction! reading nonfiction correlates with success and high achievement, helps us better understand ourselves and the world, and gives you the upper hand at trivia night.
In her article, Jessica Stillman questions whether the anti-library acts as a counter to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that leads ignorant people to assume that their knowledge or skills are more competent than they really are. since people aren’t likely to enjoy reminders of their ignorance, their unread books push them toward, if not dominance, then at least a growing understanding of the competition.
“all those books you haven’t read are surely a sign of your ignorance. but if you know how ignorant you are, you are way ahead of the vast majority of other people,” stillman writes.
Whether you prefer the term anti-library, tsundoku, or something else entirely, the value of an unread book is its power to get you to read it.
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