December 2024
The antilibrary
Friends,
Two books by Kelly Link. Dan Chaon’s latest novel. A collection of stories from Vandana Singh. Lauren Groff’s Florida. Pete Beatty’s Cuyahoga. Sailing Alone Around the World, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, and The Devils Highway. Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House.
That’s a by-no-means-exhaustive glimpse at some of the titles on my to-read shelves, a collection of books given to me by friends and family as well as titles I’ve picked up from used bookstores and Greensboro’s independent bookseller, Scuppernong Books, over the years but haven’t (yet) gotten around to reading.
Nassim Taleb calls these collections of unread books an antilibrary. I think for some folks the antilibrary is a source of anxiety. Because we are culpable for at least some of the titles in our personal antilibraries (having gone out and bought them), the presence of these unread books is disconcerting. You meant to read me, they tell us, and yet here I still sit.
In this way, each title in our antilibrary is always two things:
A book we would like to read. (Either because we’ve chosen it and it holds a special interest to us, or because someone else chose it for us, and so it holds a special interest to us.)
A book we might never read. (Because our time is limited.)
I don’t think I’m being too histrionic if I suggest that what our antilibrary is for many of us is a reminder of our mortality.
After all, one way to think of a book is as a capsule of time. The time the writer invested in writing it, of course, but more importantly the time the reader must invest in reading it. In this sense, that 300-page novel sitting on your shelf isn’t just an artifact of its material inputs (1/25th of a tree, etc.), it’s also a kind of potential Hoover vacuum hungrily angling for your (limited) future time.
Actually, the books in an antilibrary are a lot of things. I think it’s fair to say that the least interesting thing about them is that they are unread.
When I look at my shelf, I see a history of friendships. There’s the novel Pachinko, a gift from poet Joey Lew. There’s Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, which carries a wonderful inscription from my friend Dinidu. There on the bottom shelf is a copy of Blood Meridian, on apparently indefinite loan from my fellow MFA cohort-mate Kathy Contant.
There are gifts from brothers (The Secret History of Wonder Woman) and brothers-in-law (The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes) next to books from Luis Alberto Urrea and Andre Dubus III, who teach at a writing conference I’m fond of.
There are books about writing fiction (Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, Jane Alison’s Spiral, Meander, Explode), and others promising interesting dives into research projects I’ve begun and abandoned and begun again (Dave Cullen’s Columbine, several books about a sailing and maritime discovery).
Although I haven’t come close to reading some of these books in anything close to a semi-appropriate time frame from when they were purchased or given to me, their continuing presence in my antilibrary isn’t a form of abandonment or disregard. They sit on the most important shelf in my house, the one by my desk that I look at every day. And when I see them, I’m reminded of friendships and family and the pleasant pull of my own deep-seated and always unsatiated sense of curiosity about the world. It’s a bookshelf full of endless promise and future connection and an antidote against loneliness.
Contrast this to the feeling I get when I walk into a bookstore, where all the weight of all of that accumulated time lining the shelves seems always threatening to crush me.
Happy Holidays,
Evan