MY ANTILIBRARY
I have stacks of unread books in my study, the bedroom, and in a few other places in my house. Some are partially read, others are still waiting to be opened on the day when their purpose is finally fulfilled - that is when I, the reader, pick them up to read. I am taken with Umberto Eco’s idea of the “antilibrary,” the necessary, yet unread books in one’s personal library. The essayist, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, describes Eco’s antilibrary in this way:
…[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.
By your bedside or somewhere else at home, do you have a stack of books you are either reading or planning to read? I have ten to twelve books in mine. I also have e-books on hold at my local library that I am waiting to read when the queue finally gets to me. This stack does not include the books I read for my academic or professional writing. Those books are found in a different stack. It also does not include the many books I started and stopped reading when they became uninteresting or too time-consuming to finish. If you are one of those people who start a book and will not open another until you have finished the first one, then you might not appreciate how it feels to be in the middle of ten to twelve books, as I often am in my apparently neurodivergent state.
I love reading but rarely have the focus to engage in it during the day. I tend to save it for late at night when I am about to go to bed. Some books are so interesting that they keep me awake long after I put them down. They are best to avoid at bedtime. Others are certain to lead to slumber. I tend to read according to how I am feeling at the time. Sometimes a history book appeals; at other times, a mystery or detective novel fits the bill. When you decide what to read according to your current emotion or feeling, the number of books you are reading simultaneously seems to rise in relative proportion.
As far as my own antilibrary goes, there are a few books that I still aspire to finish. One is Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In 2008, I bought the acclaimed Pevear and Volokhonsky translation that had recently been published. The book is more than 1200 pages long. While I always enjoy reading it, when I pick it up, I am still only about a third of the way through the book. Most of the time the thought of picking it up to read again fills me with dread because I know how much more of it there still is to read. I have wanted to finish it since I was in middle school, because in those years I was a fanatic reader of books about the Napoleonic Wars. Even at that young age my enthusiasm caused me to paint 2000 plastic figures with historically accurate colors based on books that I myself had ordered from England and France. It did not matter that the two-volume French set on military uniforms of the Napoleonic era was in a language that I could not understand. That was something to be worried about later. In that same year, I read in its entirety David G. Chandler’s 1172-paged book, The Campaigns of Napoleon. I also went to see the abridged Russian film of War and Peace in the movie theater more than once. As I am admitting all this, I will pick up War and Peace again soon, and maybe this time I will finish reading it.
I also have never gotten very far in the three volume set of Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time. that sits on my shelves. I want to finish it because in my own doctoral work I read much of what Walter Benjamin wrote about Proust, including some of his unfinished German translation of Proust. Benjamin focused, in part, on how Proust managed to construct synthetic experience in his narration. A few years ago, I was thrilled to see that In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way was published in a graphic novel format. The graphic novel preserves some of the most beautiful passages, if not in the actual dialogue of the characters, then in the margins. This has allowed me to read the story such that it moves along at a faster pace than Proust could ever have imagined (or permitted) while allowing me to look, should I so desire, for the original, fuller passage in the original novel.
These weighty tomes occupy an interstitial space, that is, an in-between space in my library, as they are both read and unread. They signal the transitional space between aspiration and completion accompanied by a desire to know what I do not yet know. Curiosity keeps me moving forward, but the work of learning, much like the work of listening, takes patience. Sometimes, I run out of that. The antilibrary is a space of potentiality, a space of openness to possibility, and a space of dreams. What do you think about Umberto Eco’s claim that unread books are far more valuable that read books? What’s in your antilibrary?