Umarbek

Anti-Library

Umberto Eco kept a library of 30,000 books. When visitors asked if he'd read them all, he'd explain that the unread books were the point. A personal library is not a trophy case of conquered texts. It's a research tool. The books you haven't read are a constant reminder of what you don't know.

Nassim Taleb calls this the "antilibrary" and argues it grows more valuable as you learn more. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know, and the larger your collection of unread books becomes.

This is mine.

• Letters from a Stoic (Epistulae Morales) — Seneca
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
• Discourses — Epictetus
• Enchiridion — Epictetus
• On Duties (De Officiis) — Cicero
• On Old Age — Cicero
• Letters — Cicero
• Essays — Michel de Montaigne
• Adages — Erasmus
• Maxims — François de La Rochefoucauld
• Maxims and Thoughts — Nicolas Chamfort
• Characters — Jean de La Bruyère
• Reflections and Maxims — Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues
• Against the Professors (Adversus Mathematicos) — Sextus Empiricus
• Commentaries on the Gallic War — Julius Caesar
• Anabasis — Xenophon
• History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides
• The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifah) — Al-Ghazali
• Historical and Critical Dictionary — Pierre Bayle
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
• Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Pretense of Knowledge — Friedrich Hayek
• The Fatal Conceit — Friedrich Hayek
• The (Mis)Behavior of Markets — Benoit Mandelbrot
• Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart — Gerd Gigerenzer
• Gut Feelings — Gerd Gigerenzer
• A Man for All Markets — Edward O. Thorp
• Zero to One — Peter Thiel
• Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 — William L. Shirer
• What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars — Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan
• Muqaddimah — Ibn Khaldun
• Novum Organum — Francis Bacon
• The Art of Worldly Wisdom — Baltasar Gracián
• Aphorisms — Hippocrates
• Sententiae — Publilius Syrus
• Outlines of Pyrrhonism — Sextus Empiricus
• Ars Conjectandi — Jacob Bernoulli
• Analects — Confucius
• Tao Te Ching — Laozi
• Dhammapada — Anonymous
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Fathers and Sons — Ivan Turgenev
• Short Stories — Anton Chekhov
• The Red and the Black — Stendhal
• The Charterhouse of Parma — Stendhal
• In Search of Lost Time — Marcel Proust
• Journey to the End of the Night — Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• The Trial — Franz Kafka
• The Castle — Franz Kafka
• Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges
• Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges
• If on a winter's night a traveler — Italo Calvino
• Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino
• The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
• As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
• Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller
• Moby-Dick — Herman Melville
• Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
• Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad
• Man's Fate — André Malraux
• Pensées — Blaise Pascal
• Essays and Aphorisms — Arthur Schopenhauer
• Twilight of the Idols — Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Trouble with Being Born — Emil Cioran
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Incoherence of the Incoherence — Averroës
• Guide for the Perplexed — Maimonides
• The Canon of Medicine — Avicenna
• Straw Dogs — John Gray
• The Mediterranean — Fernand Braudel
• Taking the Medicine — Druin Burch
• The Economic Laws of Scientific Research — Terence Kealey
• The Halo Effect — Phil Rosenzweig
• Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction — Paul Meehl

This list grows faster than it shrinks. That's the point.