1. Every curious person should be a serious reader. Ever serious reader should build an antilibrary. (Essential vocab for this thread: your antilibrary = all the books you know about but have *not* read, designating a sort of potential energy for learning / knowledge / reading)
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2. An antilibrary should exist in both physical form (books on your shelves; books browsed but unpurchased at your favorite bookstores) and virtual form (in digital lists; in tweets and reviews scanned; in your memory).
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3. An antilibrary should have many levels: books you have an urgent desire to read, books you definitely want to read someday, books you find intriguing but may never read, books you've lost interest in entirely Categorize not only by topic but by priority / importance / status
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4. You should add at least 10 books to your antilibrary for every book you actually read. (This doesn't mean you need to own them all! I mean you can if $ / space allows, but also…keep lists of books you want to read & refer back to!)
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5. The more time you spend building your antilibrary, the better you'll get at finding & learning about great books. And therefore: the better your antilibrary, the better books you'll read. Same time spent reading overall (hrs or books per year) becomes more valuable.
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6. Corollary: You should cull your antilibrary semi-regularly. Maybe once a year, go through your shelves and get rid of unread books that no longer interest you, to make room for more of those that do. Digital too: clean up your list(s), re-prioritize your queue(s)…
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7. Most of the time, taking notes while reading is useless. You likely won't need super specific notes anyway and it distracts from the flow / immersion in what you're reading. If you really want to come back to something, add a lightweight bookmark to flag for later review.
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8. We should all be more aware of (& deliberately apply) the many different levels of reading that exist — the spectrum from close reading to skimming a book quickly for major themes / ideas. Different books + different contexts demand different approaches for optimal reading.
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9. Bookstores are not libraries. Libraries are not bookstores. They have both more overlap in mission / value, & more differences, than we sometimes recognize. Both great for book discovery! Entirely different $ models! Each w/ diff weird niches!
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10. Bookstores should experiment more with weird business models. Dear bookstores: don't be afraid of things like memberships, charging people admission, etc. If implemented well they won't tarnish your purity or whatever; they just might help sustain the bookstore!
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11. More books should be not-books instead. Intentionally, actively unwritten; sketched as potential books. Preemptive Borgesian self-annihilation to make space for the books that author truly should write. (Different from "books that shouldn't exist". Plenty of those too!)
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12. It's very often better to read one really big, long, challenging book, than 10 shorter ones. If you choose well the long one will be more formative and memorable. Quality over quantity, but given quality, quantity can be its own pleasure!
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13. Every reader should regularly conduct a reading diversity audit. Diverse reading is valuable in many ways, for many measures of "diverse". Being more conscious of what your reading looks like is a good way to counteract unconscious bias / unintentionally narrow reading.
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14. Book prices vary a ton. They should probably vary even more. Value of books varies astronomically! Some books should pay you to read them. Some books could be a good value at $1000.
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15. The trick / challenge is that books don't have inherent fixed value. That depends on the right match of book + reader. So getting really good at telling which books may deliver best value for *you* = reading arbitrage opportunity, get more out of each book than most could.
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16. Libraries and ebooks are a match made in hell. Both are really and truly great (!) but putting them together reveals a clusterfuck of weird incentives and structural compromises and unrealized potential that threatens a migraine if you look too closely.
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17. There aren't *that* many truly great books you definitely need to read. While there are infinitely more good books than you can ever read in a lifetime, you can probably get to a surprisingly high portion of those that are both excellent & a good match for you personally.
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18. We need more sui generis books — books that attempt to create their own rules, define their own categories, blur all the lines.
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19. You should be both more discerning & more guided by serendipity in your reading. More discerning: have a high filter; add many books to your antilibrary but read relatively few. More serendipity: seek books from uncommon sources; read books that others frequently overlook.
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20. Corollary re: serendipity: you should spend more time in used bookstores! A truly great used bookstore = a truly great place to discover books you'd never in a million years stumble across in Barnes and Noble or on Amazon or in NYT Books or in recs from friends etc.
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21. We should read more books aloud to each other! This practice all too often ends with adulthood. But it need not! Listening to books read aloud (not audiobooks — they can be cool too — but live direct reading) is a great and special pleasure. As is reading them.
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22. If you live in a city you should have at least one favorite bookstore. If a big city, ideally several, new & used & specialty. If you don't have any bookstores near where you live…what better heuristic for planning a move!
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23. Book collecting, fetishizing books as objects, is boring. Don't be precious about books! There are absolutely books you should acquire physical copies of rather than ebooks. Owning many books is great. But should be b/c content demands it, not driven by collecting as an end.
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24. Building your "read really big books" muscle is helpful for practicing sustained attention & deep engagement. Living with a text for months on end, whether a particular story or set of ideas, creates a special type of relationship!
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25. Book clubs / reading groups are if anything underutilized as a structure for both socializing & for learning. We should experiment more with social reading formats: tiny emergent book groups, reading retreats, annotation collectives…all kinds of possibilities!
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26. Gifting books? Buy ones that you'd actually read too! Time it right & you just may be able to get through them yourself before you wrap and gift them. Like 2 books for the price of 1.
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27. Regifting books: also totally fine! Books should have long lives. Exceptions: if you hated a book, just get rid of it quietly. If it's in visibly poor condition, ditto and also please take better care of your books.
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28. Every reader should attempt to trace a reading path, history, trajectory of how your reading has evolved over a long timespan. How has your reading practice shifted? How have your tastes changed? How has your antilibrary grown? All fruitful questions to ponder!
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29. Aim to buy at least one book every time you go to a bookstore. It's just…how things are done. Barring special cases you *probably* shouldn't buy > 10 at once. Write down all interesting ones & add to your antilibrary. Any you can't get out of your head, buy later!
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30. More bookstore advice: any book that speaks to you (in whatever intuitively obvious way), and that you haven't come across before, counts as a special discovery and you should buy it right away.
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