MY overflowing bookshelves have been a constant bone of contention for Aurit, my wife, and me. “Why do you need so many books when you won’t be able to read all of them in your lifetime?” Ouch. And then to slam home her point, she adds: “The termites will devour them before you get to read them!” I can’t argue back because our house sits on a piece of land that happens to be a chomping ground of termites, which have already eaten at least two or three boxfuls of my books.
Why do I own more books than I can read is a good question, to which I can’t give a satisfying answer.
My 3 children do not share my love of books. Besides, how can book reading compete against the ubiquitous digital gadgets in today’s era of touch-and-click? So I can’t pass my collection to any one of them. There’s a grand daughter who seems to give equal time to books and her tablet. Although the books she is reading are for juveniles and teens.
My mother bought me my first book when I was aged 7. It was about the story of Christmas and it had illustrations in full color. I eagerly turned the pages from cover to cover. That probably sparked my lifelong love of book reading.
During our pre-pandemic trip to the local mall, while my wife would head for the grocery section, I would go straight to a second-hand bookstore nearby and walk out with two or three books after a while.
This is not a case of bibliomania, which is the obsessive collecting of books to show them off to people, and not their eventual reading. I don’t brag about my collection. Buying books is not really an obsession or addiction because I don’t buy books beyond what I can afford. For me, it’s more of a kind of “passionate enthusiasm.”
The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. This leads to occasional pangs of guilt over the unread volumes about to spill over from my shelves.
So I could cover more books and squeeze as much pages into my snatched reading time, I read three books at a time, alternating them, something like 10 pages per book. That’s probably a lateral skill I developed from my forced multi-tasking at work.
But lately I have learned to stop worrying about it because I am not alone apparently. Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them, only to let them stay unread on the shelf.
According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his best-selling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, the eminent author and scholar Umberto Eco had a personal library with a staggering collection of 30,000 books. I doubt if he was able to read all of them. Eco stated as much. Doing a little calculation, he found he could only read about 25,200 books if he read one book a day, every day, between the ages of 10 and 80.
Why then did he build such a voluminous library? According to Taleb, the reason was to show that he desired to read so much more because the more he read, the more he realized he knew so little.
Ignoring my wife’s occasional complaint about my collection, I assuage my guilt by thinking of the still unread books as yet-unrealized knowledge or unexplored ideas to propel me to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that I know enough or I know more than others.
Drawing from Eco’s example, Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of the things we don’t know. Jessica Stillman, a writer and editor, calls this realization “intellectual humility.” It is a constant, niggling reminder of our limitations—the vast quantity of things we don’t know, half-know, or will one day realize we were mistaken about.
The titles in my small eclectic library such as Design Of Every Day Things, La Diva Nicotina, Documentary History of Art, Banana, The Philosophy of the Mind, White Mughals, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Stranded Whale, Manila: Sin City, just to name a few, serve to remind me of all the things I crave to know while I still can read.
Having a book collection is like having sages and wise people around me. It provides me a living, growing resource that I can learn from until I reach 80, if I’m lucky.
My books also have deep sentimental value. They show the eclectic range of my interests, as well as the different stages in my intellectual progress.
This is why I can’t imagine my room being emptied of books. Was it Cicero who said: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” Without my books, my life would be soulless.
But I started feeling less guilty about my stacks of read and unread books when I encountered the word “tsundoku,” which is the Japanese art of buying books and never reading them.
The word originated in the late 19th century as a satirical jab at teachers who owned books but didn’t read them. Today the word has a positive connotation in Japanese culture, akin to a badge of honor, signifying a person who seeks to learn as much as he can while he lives.
If it is true that children watch what their parents do, I am hopeful that by seeing me reading at home, I can serve as a role model for my adult children and my grandkids. Research indicates that reading is a behavior that transfers strongly from generation to generation.
By simply exposing my grandkids to the daily sight of my stacks of books in our home, I am crossing my fingers that one day, they might be piqued enough to put down their tablets and smart phones for a while and pick up a book or two from my collection.
Nothing can equal that immense joy I felt as a first-time book owner. That deep delightful feeling has never waned even now. Some kind of boyish exhilaration fills me every time I open an unread book for the first time.
I pray that in the same way, by some kind of a magical spark, the deep joy and the power of learning through book reading will be kindled in them.