https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/do-i-own-too-many-books/
On Tuesday, 3 January, 2023 at 01:23:01 am IST, Rajaram Krishnamurthy
<[email protected]> wrote:
The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my tsundoku.
(Photo from Wikimedia)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them only to let
them linger on the shelf.
- Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with
unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don't know.
- The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting
benefits.
Kevin DickinsonCopy a link to the article entitled
http://The%20Japanese%20call%20this%20practice%20tsundoku,%20and%20it%20may%20provide%20lasting%20benefitsShare
The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits
on FacebookShare The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide
lasting benefits on TwitterShare The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and
it may provide lasting benefits on LinkedIn
This article was first published on Big Think in October 2018. It was updated
in December 2022.
Ilove books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three
books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the
bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that
it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of
earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.
The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. This
leads to FOMO and occasional pangs of guilt over the unread volumes spilling
across my shelves. Sound familiar?
But it’s possible this guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an
“antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of intellectual
failings. Quite the opposite.
Umberto Eco signs a book. You can see a portion of the author’s vast
antilibrary in the background.
(Photo from Wikimedia)
LIVING WITH AN ANTILIBRARY
Taleb laid out the concept of the antilibrary in his best-selling bookThe Black
Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He starts with a discussion of the
prolific author and scholar Umberto Eco, whose personal library housed a
staggering 30,000 books.
When Eco hosted visitors, many would marvel at the size of his library and
assumed it represented the host’s knowledge — which, make no mistake, was
expansive. But a few savvy visitors realized the truth: Eco’s library wasn’t
voluminous because he had read so much; it was voluminous because he desired to
read so much more.
Skip Ad
Eco stated as much. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he found 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, compared to the million books
available at any good library.
Drawing from Eco’s example, Taleb deduces:
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] 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. [Emphasis original]
Maria Popova, whose post at Brain Pickings summarizes Taleb’s argument
beautifully, notes that our tendency is to overestimate the value of what we
know, while underestimating the value of what we don’t know. Taleb’s
antilibrary flips this tendency on its head.
The antilibrary’s value stems from how it challenges our self-estimation by
providing a constant, niggling reminder of all we don’t know. The titles lining
my own home remind me that I know little to nothing about cryptography, the
evolution of feathers, Italian folklore, illicit drug use in the Third Reich,
and whatever entomophagy is. (Don’t spoil it; I want to be surprised.)
“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and
defended,” Taleb writes. “It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the
pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing
on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations.”
These selves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue
learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls
this realization intellectual humility.
People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to
acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at
having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the
use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for
decoration alone. Not a living, growing resource we can learn from until we are
80 — and, if we are lucky, a few years beyond.
Book swap attendees will no doubt find their antilibrary/tsundoku grow.
(Photo from Flickr)
TSUNDOKU
I love Taleb’s concept, but I must admit I find the label “antilibrary” a bit
lacking. For me, it sounds like a plot device in a knockoff Dan Brown novel —
“Quick! We have to stop the Illuminati before they use the antilibrary to erase
all the books in existence.”
Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to
your inbox every ThursdayFields marked with an * are required
Writing for the New York Times, Kevin Mims also doesn’t care for Taleb’s label.
Thankfully, his objection is a bit more practical: “I don’t really like Taleb’s
term ‘antilibrary.’ A library is a collection of books, many of which remain
unread for long periods of time. I don’t see how that differs from an
antilibrary.”
His preferred label is a loanword from Japan: tsundoku. Tsundoku is the
Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t 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
owned books but didn’t read them. While that is opposite of Taleb’s point,
today the word carries no stigma in Japanese culture. It’s also differs from
bibliomania, which is the obsessive collecting of books for the sake of the
collection, not their eventual reading.
THE VALUE OF TSUNDOKU
Granted, I’m sure there is some braggadocious bibliomaniac out there who owns a
collection comparable to a small national library, yet rarely cracks a cover.
Even so, studies have shown that book ownership and reading typically go hand
in hand to great effect.
One such study found that children who grew up in homes with between 80 and 350
books showed improved literacy, numeracy, and information communication
technology skills as adults. Exposure to books, the researchers suggested,
boosts these cognitive abilities by making reading a part of life’s routines
and practices.
Many other studies have shown reading habits relay a bevy of benefits. They
suggest reading can reduce stress, satisfy social connection needs, bolster
social skills and empathy, and boost certain cognitive skills. And that’s just
fiction! Reading nonfiction is correlated with success and high achievement,
helps us better understand ourselves and the world, and gives you the edge come
trivia night.
In her article, Jessica Stillman ponders whether the antilibrary acts as a
counter to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that leads ignorant
people to assume their knowledge or abilities are more proficient than they
truly are. Since people are not prone to enjoying reminders of their ignorance,
their unread books push them toward, if not mastery, then at least a
ever-expanding understanding of competence.
“All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if
you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other
people,” Stillman writes.
Whether you prefer the term antilibrary, tsundoku, or something else entirely,
the value of an unread book is its power to get you to read it. KR IRS 2123
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Thatha_Patty" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/2034203143.5247724.1672801254039%40mail.yahoo.com.
