Growing Our (Anti) Library
From Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, about Umberto Eco’s home library:
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 read-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.*
My friend Jack, who blogs at Knowledge Volt, sent me the link, from Matthew Cornell, in response to my guilt over book-buying binges. In keeping with the antilibrary, my trips last week to Half Price Books and Barnes and Noble in St. Louis Park:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (Oxford World Classics mini HC edition)
Terminator 2 dvd
Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin (spiffy vintage-look Penguin cover)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Laura by Vera Caspary
China Mountain Zhang (gave our copy away years ago)
Curly Girl by Lorraine Massey (my own copy, since the one I have is from the library)
For the kids:
Starting School by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
Three Scooby Doo easy readers
The Firefighters Busy Day by Richard Scarry
Noisy Nora by Rosemary Wells
Sammy the Seal by Syd Hoff
It’s My Birthday by Helen Oxenbury
Anatole and the Cat by Eve Titus
I put the books on top of our built-in buffet, near the ceiling. My 5yo son Drake was so eager to get his hands on them that I barely got that photo taken before he started climbing, and dismantled the display:
Here’s 3yo Guppy, who can’t yet read, asleep on Sammy the Seal. Perhaps any book they can’t yet read themselves is part of the boys’ antilibrary.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:16 am
what a SUPERB haul…and good for you!! I heartily approve of antilibraries.
May 16th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
How many copies of Jane Eyre does that make now?
I received P&P&Z as a gift a few weeks back, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to it. I suppose I am due for a re-read of Pride & Prejucide soon… perhaps I do need to throw in some zombies?