Motivated by reading from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
book about the importance of unread books (antilibrary) to look menacingly at you and the fact that Umberto Eco’s library is 30,000 books I decided to count the number of books I have in my own library. I found it embarrassingly small by comparison, just 1,600 printed books (2 of them are written by Umberto Eco). However, I must admit that I don’t have the antilibrary or its sizeof approaches zero because I strive to read them all in a round-robin fashion (which I call Mod N Reading System) with several priority and place-time of the day queues. Obviously the more books I have the longer it takes to finish any one of them but this has a positive impact because it allows me to avoid reading pathologies outlined in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
book (which I read from cover to cover), for example, I can contemplate about any book for longer period instead of overflowing my head with ideas during the nonstop reading or forgetting about the book after some time. I also found that overlapped reading facilitates creativity and breeds more ideas. I recently extended Mod N reading to encyclopedias and will talk about it later on.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -
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on Saturday, June 4th, 2011 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Books, Reading (General, Metareading).
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