I started tracking my reading in 2016. I started writing this blog in 2022. Since 2016, I’ve read 261 books. Since 2022, I’ve written over 500K words. But just over the course of 2024 and 2025 I’ve finally managed to both write consistently and keep up with reading 30-40 books a year. But despite my consistency, I find myself dwelling more on the books not read and the words not written.
Just in my personal library of physical books, I have ~1K books or so. That doesn’t even scratch the surface on all the books I have in my “Books To Read” list. If I’ve read ~260 books in 10 years, that means it would take 40 years just to finish the books on my shelf.
Source: Personal Website
The same is true with my writing. Despite having written consistently every week, averaging ~2.3K words per week, I often feel like I haven’t scratched the surface on what I want to say. Just for starters, I consistently have dozens of notes of things I want to write.
Source: My Apple Notes App
Every word I read or write feels dogged by the word left unread or unwritten. But then, this year, I came across something that changed my perspective. A friend of mine asked me, of all the books I read this year, which was my least favorite. I don’t think this is a bad book, but the one I struggled the most to get through was Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan. But despite my lack of book-vibe fit, I found a quote that has come to encapsulate how I think about my book collection and, by extension, my reading habit:
“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 allow 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.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Another way of saying it is my defense to my wife every time I buy new books, despite how many I have that I haven’t read. Reading books and collecting books are two different hobbies. What Taleb is saying, in my opinion, is that the pursuit of knowledge exposes you to the Dunning-Kruger effect. As you realize just how ignorant you are, you will seek more knowledge. That means more books unread, more words left unwritten.
That focus on an antilibrary as a source of pride is important for me as I wrestle with my own inadequacy. I’m not failing to make a dent in my bookshelf, I’m building the corpus of my own ignorant knowledge pursuit. I’m not failing to write what I want to say; I’m basking in the ignorance that I’m unpacking.
By way of update on my reading, I managed to stay away from the COVID trough of 10-15 books a year and keep it above 30, albeit a drop from last year. Last year, I wrote about the need to “Always Be Reading.” What Ryan Holiday [talks about](https://ryanholiday.net/heres-some-stuff-worth-carrying-with-you-everywhere/#:~:text=A book — You should always,most common email I get.) as just reading all the time. In 2024, I largely deleted any distracting app and spent all my time reading. I take pride in the fact that this year, despite seeing my Twitter addiction come raging back, I still managed to read 30+ books.
What’s more, I’m noticing an increasingly broader diversity in the things I’m reading. Typically, each year, I highlight 2-3 themes I noticed across all my writing. This year, I had 6.