HAY UNA PALABRA PARA TODOS ESOS

LIBROS QUE HAS COMPRADO PERO NO

HAS LEÍDO
Por KEVIN MIMS
18 de octubre de 2018

Read in English
Tengo muchos más libros de los que podría leer durante el
resto de mi vida. Sin embargo, cada mes agrego decenas más a
mis estantes. Durante años, me sentí culpable de esta situación,
hasta que leí un artículo de Jessica Stillman en el sitio web de la
revista Inc. titulado “Why You Should Surround Yourself With
More Books Than You’ll Ever Have Time to Read” (Por qué debes
rodearte de más libros de los que tengas tiempo para leer).
Stillman argumenta que una biblioteca personal demasiado
grande como para leerla en una vida “no es una señal de fracaso
ni ignorancia”, sino más bien “una medalla de honor”. Su
argumento era una variación del tema que propuso Nassim
Nicholas Taleb en su exitoso libro The Black Swan (2007), acerca
del impacto desmesurado de los sucesos importantes e
impredecibles en nuestras vidas. Básicamente, Taleb afirma que
aunque solemos valorar más las cosas conocidas que las
desconocidas, lo que ignoramos y, por lo tanto, no podemos ver
venir, tiende a transformar nuestro mundo de manera más
drástica.
La biblioteca de una persona a menudo es una representación
simbólica de su mente. Alguien que ha dejado de expandir su
biblioteca personal podría llegar a creer que sabe todo lo
necesario y que las cosas que no conoce no pueden lastimarlo.
No desea seguir creciendo intelectualmente. Quien siempre está
expandiendo su biblioteca entiende la importancia de seguir
sintiendo curiosidad y de estar abierto a voces e ideas nuevas.
Taleb argumenta que una biblioteca personal “debe tener
tanta información desconocida como lo permitan tus finanzas,
las tasas hipotecarias y el actual estado tan limitado del mercado
de bienes raíces. Acumularás más conocimiento y más libros
conforme envejezcas y, desde los estantes, el número creciente
de libros que no has leído te parecerá amenazador. En efecto,
cuanto más sepas, más grandes serán las filas de libros no
abiertos. Digamos que esa colección de libros sin leer es una
antibiblioteca”.
No me encanta ese último término que usa Taleb. Una
biblioteca es una colección de libros, muchos de los cuales
permanecen sin leerse durante largos periodos. No veo por qué
eso es algo distinto de una antibiblioteca. Una mejor palabra para
definirlo podría ser tsundoku, que en japonés significa “pila de
libros que has comprado pero todavía no has leído”. Casi el diez
por ciento de mi biblioteca personal se compone de libros que he
leído; el otro noventa por ciento es tsundoku. Quizá tengo cerca
de tres mil libros, pero muchos son antologías o compilaciones
que contienen varias obras. Tengo muchos volúmenes de Library
of America, una serie que publica en un solo tomo las novelas
completas de autores como Dashiell Hammett y Nathanael West.
Cuando termino un libro, a menudo lo regalo o lo intercambio en
una tienda de libros usados. Como resultado, mi tsundoku
siempre se está expandiendo mientras el número de libros que
he leído sigue constante, de unos cuantos cientos.
Sin embargo, a decir verdad, tsundoku no puede describir
gran parte de mi biblioteca. Tengo muchas colecciones de
cuentos, antologías de poemas y libros de ensayos que compré
sabiendo que quizá no leería todas las páginas. Autores como
Taleb, Stillman y quien haya acuñado la palabra tsundoku
parecen reconocer solo dos categorías de libros: los leídos y los
no leídos. No obstante, todos los amantes de los libros saben que
hay una tercera categoría que está en algún punto medio: los
libros parcialmente leídos. Casi todos los títulos de la sección de
Referencia que hay en los estantes de los amantes de los libros,
por ejemplo, entra en esta categoría. Nadie lee el American
Heritage Dictionary ni el Tesauro de Roget de cabo a rabo.
Uno de mis libros favoritos es The Stanford Companion to
Victorian Fiction de John Sutherland. Se trata de un análisis
fascinante, sesudo, ingenioso y muy obstinado de las novelas y
los novelistas de la Inglaterra victoriana, desde los famosos
(Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray) hasta los justificablemente
olvidados (Sutherland describe las novelas de Tom Gallon como
“ficción subdickensiana sobre los sentimientos y la chusma en
Londres, generalmente escrita de manera elíptica y sin gracia”).
He tenido el libro durante veinte años y me ha dado mucho
placer, pero dudo que logre leer todas las palabras que contienen
ese o decenas de otros libros de referencia en mis estantes.
Generalmente tampoco leo las biografías completas, porque
los biógrafos suelen incluir toda la información que puedan en
sus libros. En realidad, no me importan las cifras que obtuvo
Ogden Nash en su boleta de calificaciones del tercer grado ni
cuántos baúles llenos de ropa hizo transportar Edith Wharton a
través del Atlántico cuando se mudó a Francia. Quizá hay cientos
de biografías en mi biblioteca personal. He leído partes de la
mayoría, pero muy pocas por completo. Lo mismo sucede con
las colecciones de cartas. Cuando termino de leer una obra de
ficción de Willa Cather, digamos, quizá me sienta inspirado a
sacar el enorme tomo de Las cartas selectas de Willa Cather e
intentar saber cómo era la autora cuando “no estaba
trabajando”.
Esos no pueden contarse como libros que he leído, y tampoco
pueden etiquetarse como tsundoku. Al igual que gran parte de
mi biblioteca, viven en la zona intermedia de los parcialmente
leídos. Taleb argumenta que “los libros leídos son mucho menos
valiosos que los no leídos” porque los que no has leído pueden
enseñarte cosas que aún no sabes. En realidad no estoy de
acuerdo con él. Creo que es buena idea que en tus estantes haya
libros leídos y no leídos, pero es igual de importante esa tercera
categoría de libros: los que no has leído por completo y quizá
jamás termines.
Ver un libro que ya leíste puede recordarte las muchas cosas
que has aprendido. Ver un libro que no has leído puede
recordarte que hay muchas cosas que aún debes aprender. Por
último, ver un libro parcialmente leído puede recordarte que leer
es una actividad que esperas que nunca termine.
Quizá hay una palabra en japonés para describir eso.

Kevin Mims vive en Sacramento y trabaja en la librería Avid

Reader, donde ha leído parcialmente gran parte del inventario.

WHY YOU SHOULD SURROUND

YOURSELF WITH MORE BOOKS THAN
YOU'LL EVER HAVE TIME TO READ
An overstuffed bookcase (or e-reader) says good
things about your mind.

By Jessica Stillman

Lifelong learning will help you be happier, earn more, and

even stay healthier, experts say. Plus, plenty of the smartest
names in business, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk, insist that the
best way to get smarter is to read. So what do you do? You go
out and buy books, lots of them.
But life is busy, and intentions are one thing, actions another.
Soon you find your shelves (or e-reader) overflowing with titles
you intend to read one day, or books you flipped through once
but then abandoned. Is this a disaster for your project to become
a smarter, wiser person?
If you never actually get around to reading any books, then
yes. You might want to read up on tricks to squeeze more reading
into your hectic life and why it pays to commit a few hours every
week to learning. But if it's simply that your book reading in no
way keeps pace with your book buying, I have good news for you
(and for me; I definitely fall into this category): Your overstuffed
library isn't a sign of failure or ignorance, it's a badge of honor.

Why you need an "antilibrary"

That's the argument author and statistician Nassim Nicholas
Taleb makes in his bestseller The Black Swan. Perpetually
fascinating blog Brain Pickings dug up and highlighted the section
in a particularly lovely post. Taleb kicks off his musings with an
anecdote about the legendary library of Italian writer Umberto
Eco, which contained a jaw-dropping 30,000 volumes.
Did Eco actually read all those books? Of course not, but that
wasn't the point of surrounding himself with so much potential
but as-yet-unrealized knowledge. By providing a constant
reminder of all the things he didn't know, Eco's library kept him
intellectually hungry and perpetually curious. An ever-growing
collection of books you haven't yet read can do the same for you,
Taleb writes:

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.

An antilibrary is a powerful reminder of your limitations -- the

vast quantity of things you don't know, half-know, or will one
day realize you're wrong about. By living with that reminder daily
you can nudge yourself toward the kind of intellectual humility
that improves decision-making and drives learning.
"People don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what
they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their
competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did," Taleb
claims.
Why? Perhaps because it is a well-known psychological fact
that it's the most incompetent who are the most confident of
their abilities and the most intelligent who are full of doubt.
(Really. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.) It's equally well
established that the more readily you admit you don't know
things, the faster you learn.
So stop beating yourself up for buying too many books or for
having a to-read list that you could never get through in three
lifetimes. 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.

MAKING TIME FOR LEARNING WILL

MAKE YOU HEALTHIER, RICHER, AND
MORE POPULAR
An author runs down the impressive benefits of
lifelong learning.

By Jessica Stillman
 If you're looking for reasons to make time in your busy
schedule to keep learning, there's no shortage of possibilities.
First and foremost, perhaps, is that you'll be in great company.
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah Winfrey all set aside
dedicated time to learn new things each week. Look how far the
practice has taken them.
But if you're looking for more scientific explanations of why
the end of school shouldn't mean the end of learning, writer John
Coleman is probably your man. He writes regularly for the HBR
blogs on the subject of lifelong learning and its many benefits.
One of his recent posts is a must read for those who suspect they
should make more time in their lives to nourish their brains, but
still need a bit of a kick in the pants.

Richer, happier, and more popular

In the post, Coleman runs down all the evidence for the many
benefits of lifelong learning, turning up studies and reports that
show continual study is the cure for many of life's most pressing
problems. The complete article is well worth a read in full, but
here are a few of the most impressive effects of regularly feeding
your intellect:
 You'll be richer. It's not hard to believe that in a fast-
moving world, staying on top professionally (and thus
 maxing out your earning potential) requires lifelong
learning, but if you're in doubt Coleman points you to this
piece from The Economist. The headline -- "Lifelong
learning is becoming an economic imperative" -- pretty
much says it all.
 You'll be healthier. As I've previously reported, simply
reading a small amount each week is linked with greater
health. But Coleman goes a step further, pointing out that
"while the causation is inconclusive, there's a well-studied
relationship between longevity and education." In essence,
the more you learn, the longer you're likely to live.
 You'll be more popular. Coleman has less evidence for
this one, but he asserts that in his experience, curiosity and
social success tend to go together. "While few studies
validate this observation, I've noticed in my own
interactions that those who dedicate themselves to learning
and who exhibit curiosity are almost always happier and
more socially and professionally engaging than those who
don't," he writes.
 You'll be happier. Coleman might not cite evidence linking
learning and mental well being, but there are studies
showing that a regular reading habit boosts your happiness.

How to find time for learning

Taken together, all this evidence is probably enough to
convince even the busiest among us of the value of making time
for lifelong learning. But how, practically, do you manage to
squeeze it into your schedule? The first and most important step
is to make a commitment to continuous study. Hey, if Bill Gates
can manage to fit in a little education each day, surely you have
the time too.
There are also plenty of practical tips to help turn that
commitment into reality, including clever ways to slip learning
into jam-packed days, lists of free resources for online study,
and dead simple interventions that are guaranteed to free up
hours a week for reading.
How many hours a week do you dedicate to learning?

PUBLISHED ON: FEB 17, 2017

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their
own, not those of Inc.com.

UMBERTO ECO’S ANTILIBRARY: WHY

UNREAD BOOKS ARE MORE VALUABLE
TO OUR LIVES THAN READ ONES
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats
knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the
pecking order.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
 “It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes
the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and
learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay.
Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s
famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just
comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points
it out.”. Although science is driven by “thoroughly conscious
ignorance” and the spiritual path paved with admonitions against
the illusion of thorough understanding, we cling to our knowledge
— our incomplete, imperfect, infinitesimal-in-absolute-terms
knowledge — like we cling to life itself.
And yet the contour of what we know is a mere silhouette cast
by the infinite light of the unknown against the screen of the
knowable. The great E.F. Schumacher captured this strange
dynamic in the concept of adaequatio — the notion that “the
understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to
be known.” But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and
negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the
unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable?
That’s what Lebanese-American scholar, statistician, and
essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores in a section of his
modern classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly
Improbable (public library) — an illuminating inquiry into the
unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate
profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile post-
factum explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.
 Taleb uses legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco’s uncommon
relationship with books and reading as a parable of the most
fruitful relationship with knowledge:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of
scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He
is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty
thousand books), and separates visitors into two
categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore
professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How
many of these books have you read?” and the others — a
very small minority — who get the point that 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.
 Tsudonku: Japanese for leaving a book unread after buying it, typically
piled up together with other unread books. Illustration by Ella Frances
Sanders from ‘Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of
Untranslatable Words from Around the World.’

Eco himself has since touched on humanity’s curious

relationship with the known and the unknown in his encyclopedia
of imaginary lands, the very existence of which is another
symptom of our compulsive tendency to fill in the gaps of our
understanding with concrete objects of “knowledge,” even if we
have to invent them by the force of our imagination. Taleb adds:
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to
be protected and defended. 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. People
don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they
have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their
competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will
work on standing knowledge itself on its head.

Illustration from ‘The Three Astronauts,’ Umberto Eco’s little-known

vintage semiotic children’s book.
 Noting that his Black Swan theory centers on “our
misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises” because we
underestimate the value of what we don’t know and take what
we do know “a little too seriously,” Taleb envisions the perfect
dancer in the tango with knowledge:
Let us call this an antischolar — someone who focuses on the
unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge
as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem
enhancement device — a skeptical empiricist.
Complement The Black Swan, which is fascinating it its
totality, with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with
mystery in a culture obsessed with certitude, philosopher
Hannah Arendt on how unanswerable questions give shape to
the human experience, and novelist Marilynne Robinson on the
beauty of the unknown.