The Antifragile Library
Why I'm trying to own more books than I'll ever read
Hey Friends,
In the last two years, I’ve spent over £1400 (~$1600) on books.
Books are one of my main splurges, and I don’t expect my indulgences to slow down any time soon.
Every time I walk into a bookstore, I can’t help but get the itch to buy a new book. And let’s not talk about my lack of self-discipline every time I visit the kindle section of Amazon.com.
In the last month, I’ve bought:
Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass In Out-thinking the Competition by Dave Trott (Finished)
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
Golden Son by Piece Brown
The Push: A Climber’s Journey of Endurance, Risk and Going Beyond Limits to Climb the Dawn Wall by Tommy Caldwell
Courage Is Calling by Ryan Holiday
Story Craft by Jack Hart
Soul In The Game: The Art of A Meaningful Life by Vitaliy Katsenelson
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
The Ape That Understood the Universe by Steve Stewart-Williams
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay
Evolutionary Ideas by Sam Tatam (Finished)
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (25% of the way through, but I had to pause because of how depressing it is)
The Revolt Of The Public by Martin Gurri
Yes, I know. It’s a crazy amount for the last month alone.
The unread books are stacked high on my main desk, and the read books are precariously stacked like Jenga blocks on the second desk behind me. But most of my collection is digital, read via the Kindle that was gifted to me 10 years ago.
I don’t worry about the constant accumulation of my unread books as a waste of money. The splurges on books is to remind me of my ignorance in life.
Growing up, I was told I was smart. This is one of the worst praises you can give to a child. It makes them feel entitled and fall in love with their thoughts, but I digress. I thought I could understand any topic and be arrogant enough to proclaim how the world works and should work.
Until I came across a concept in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan called ‘the Antilibrary’.
The idea behind this is:
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
You’re probably thinking, what the hell does any of that mean? Let me explain.
In The Black Swan, Taleb talks about Umberto Eco, an Italian medievalist historian massive personal collection of 30,000 books. That is far more books Eco could ever possibly read. Even if he read one book a day, it would take him 82 years to work through his library.
Eco understood that very well.
Taleb Is Now Talking:
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull.
He 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 as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
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.
Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
Eco never expected to read all 30,000 books.
Sure, he’d read a fraction of them. But the sheer volume had a more existential purpose. It gave Eco a sense of what knowledge was – how little of it we possess or could ever possess. It’s a form of intellectual humbling.
When I stare at my Antilibrary, I realise that the stuff I don’t know massively dwarfs what I do know.
It’s an antidote to being so smug about my intelligence. It’s there to humble and remind me of my ignorance in life.
As Anne-Laure Le Cunff once wrote:
“By expanding our awareness of unknown unknowns, an antilibrary may even be an antidote to the Dunning–Kruger effect, where we tend to overestimate the extent of our knowledge. Whether in a private or a public library, being surrounded by books we haven’t read yet — in the case of Umberto Eco, too many books to read in a lifetime — is a humbling experience.”
By having an Antilibrary, it represents the unknowledge.
The more I read, the far less sure I become of my conclusions and more aware of how many subjects I know nothing about. In fact, I don’t know a lot. The only deep knowledge I have is poker. For psychology, I don’t think I will ever know. Humans are way too complex for me to understand because nothing exists in limbo — everything exists in context.
The other use for an Antilibrary is that it makes you aware of what you can explore. By having so many books lying around and unread, they trigger off my curiosity. When I find myself with spare time, I scan the stacks of books and pick up whatever piques my interest.
Having a bunch of books lying around is also a useful countermeasure to the gravitational pull of social media. I’m irrational, impulsive and susceptible to doom scrolling through Instagram or Twitter. But if books are always on my desk, in my visual field, I’m more likely to pick them up. They have a fighting chance at capturing my goldfish attention.
Perhaps this is just all an excuse to assuage my book-buying splurges.
But in this era of social media, consumerism and instant gratification, I can’t think of a better alternative than spending my time and money on reading.