At the beginning of this video, Umberto Eco is seen walking in his library (0:48)

According to Vashik Armenikus, reading and book collecting becomes an obsession/addiction when you do it indiscriminately, without thought, without taking into account the bigger picture.

One point for having many unread books is to show the extent of ignorance and develop intellectual humility.

As Confucius already said: "True knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

Umberto Eco recommends to have as much unread books in your personal library as your financial means allow.

For an intellectual, the library is not there to simply collect books, but rather to serve as a tool for research.

Tsundoku = Japanese for the art of buying more books than you can read.

The author, Rediscovering Analog, reads a book at least twice, usually. He first reads it mainly for pleasure, just to enjoy it and to see what's in it. During the second time, if applicable, he goes through the book using intellectual (or learning) systems and methodologies to extract value from the book.

The first pass, which the author terms Scouting, is thus namely for enjoyment, but keeping in mind what might be valuable or interesting that will be valuable in the future, basically an unguided open ear. He has a list of scouted books in each section of the Zettelkasten that might be relevant to the section. What he does is have a stack of physical cards there with just the name of the book and the author, without anything else. Then when author proceeds to extract value from the book, he takes the card out and puts it in the respective book. Afterwards throwing this particular card into the trash. It's a form of the Anti-Library.

( Personally, I would include an appropriate reading cost and a level on Adler's hierarchy of books. In addition, I would make sure that my process of orientation, in the Inquiry-Based Learning framework, has been completed before I put it as a book within the Anti-Library. )

This may not be the most efficient for the purpose of acquiring value, but efficiency is not all there is. Enjoyment is a big part of intellectual work as well, as Antonin Sertillanges argues in his book The Intellectual Life: Its spirit, methods, conditions, as well as Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy in his book Flow.

https://www.dalekeiger.net/on-being-a-gentleman-well-unread/

Both your 積ん読 game and master level antilibrary skills are on wonderful display here.

reply to thread: https://mastodon.social/@mathew@campaign.openworlds.info/109371453439113339

Perhaps underneath the My Library you need to have an alternate path labeled "Antilibrary". Perhaps that will alleviate a lot of your cognitive dissonance and guilt.

David Quammen on Books

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.<br /> —David Quammen (1948 ― ), science, nature, and travel writer in The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

Syndication link: - https://boffosocko.com/2016/08/03/intellectual-wallpaper/