Building My Perfectly Imperfect Antilibrary

Wednesday is about books. And reading. And writing. Today it's more about books you haven't yet read...

Every so often, I’ll come across an article about all of the books you own but haven’t read. In Japan, the word is Tsundoku – it is a term for the acquiring of reading materials, and then letting them pile up without reading them.

Frequently mentioned in these types of articles is the fact that heavyweight author Umberto Eco had a personal library of some 30,000 books. It was never the goal to get through every single one, he was building an “Antilibrary” (and yes, your social media feed might chuck up articles about that too) as much as he was creating a library.

An antilibrary is a monument to what you don’t know. Unrealised knowledge. All of the things you have at arm’s length – knowledge to maybe one day consume, stories to try to get to.

I’m cataloguing everything I own. Slowly. Surely. I’m also curating. I’m cultivating. I’m starting to get rid of too much of the bulk – for issues of space, and sometimes taste. It started with records – and I have a list of my entire collection that I update, as soon as anything new comes in or anything old leaves I make the adjustments. The records I’ve been buying lately (and CDs!) are mostly movie soundtracks. So, that’s the focus of the collection now.

I also recently started (again) a DVD collection! (What with it being 2022 and all!) That list is up over 300 titles now but the side-view tells me I’ve only watched 65% of them. And that’s fantastic. That means there’s plenty more viewing to have there down the track. A part of the point of the collection. It’s as much a DVD antilibrary as it is a DVD library. Well, nearly…

And I guess the same is probably true, now, with my books. After digging about for a while, I finally chose the app to catalogue the house’s reading materials. I have an author page on Amazon, and I have a Goodreads page which I love updating. I share all the books I’m reading and write wee capsule reviews when I finish, and I also have an author profile on there too, listing the two hard copies I’ve published and the e-book collections I’ve made.

But I wanted a separate “library” online, something like Discogs – but for books. That was how my Letterboxd fixation started. I was searching for something like Discogs – but for movies.

I settled, just recently, on LibraryThing. Gosh it’s fun. The long winter evenings we appear to be having this summer are flying by! I walk around the house with my phone in hand, scanning books on shelves, a reminder of my retail days. Some days I really do miss that part of life. Just last week I dumped two bags of old books at a second-hand store where I used to work. I introduced myself to the new owner, and explained that the only reason I left was because it was a very part-time role, if I could have had a full-time job there, I would have been the happiest. But it wasn’t sustainable.

Now, I’m scratching that itch – shelf by shelf I am slowly committing our book collection to internet posterity. And so, as I’m going through them, I’m noticing how much the collection has shifted. How much smaller it is too. I’ve logged close to 1000 titles, and I imagine we once had 5000 books at least. Which is both heaps. And nowhere near enough. But such is life. The biggest book cull ever was when we moved into the place where we now live – that was 12 years ago. And it’s a bigger house than our first place. We sold and gave away hundreds and hundreds of books. Possibly thousands, even. For space – and headspace.

From working in a second-hand bookstore (I have worked in new book shops too) I realised what joy it is for people to find the thing they didn’t know they were looking for. I mean, I’ve experienced that directly, as a book-buyer. But to see it as the seller was something else.

Books must go, to make room for more books you might never read. And that’s both mad and wonderful.

And there is always a chance you might get rid of something and then regret it – which is why so many people tell you they can’t ever part with books. But guess what? You can just buy it again, or use the library, or buy it for your e-reader. I’ve done all of those things, and I don’t feel silly doing that. Sometimes you don’t know that you need the book in your life. But when you’re ready, the book will tell you.

One of my favourite things is to discover a book on the shelf and finally sit down and have a go at something I bought so long ago. I was a different person when I bought it, when I first had the idea that I needed to have it. How will I process that book now? I’m different. Is the book different too?

I’ve been rediscovering my book collection by looking at it more closely.

I’ve been finding so many things, the “To Read” list is now threateningly long.

All of the “summer reads” I won’t quite get to but will pack anyway.

Nearly 20 years ago, Paul Morley released Words and Music: A History of Pop In The Shape of a City. In the book, he takes a virtual road-trip, accompanied by the then pop hit du jour, Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head – no apologies if you now can’t get that out of your head; it’s a banger!  

I bought that with the full intention of reading it, because Morley is a genius and because that song is brilliant, and the idea of the book sat beautifully with me. I presume I read a review tipping me off.

But I never read the book. Almost every year since, I have decided it would be the one music book I’d read that summer. The closest I got, was logging it as “reading” on Goodreads back in 2017. A bookmark at page 5 tells us all that I didn’t get far on the book’s road-trip. Not even to the end of Kylie’s first chorus…

A couple of years ago now, a friend asked me if I had the book. Turns out he’s in it. Footnoted somewhere. His experimental band mentioned in passing. And, fair enough, he thought it would be cool to have a go at reading it, and to have a copy for his files. I told him that when I found it and finally read it, he could have my copy.

Because, in general, my library is becoming an antilibrary – I am, most often, parting with books I’ve read in favour of books I haven’t yet read. Though of course there are exceptions, favourites, must-haves-forever.

But of course the Morley book was lost high on a shelf somewhere.

Well, last week, in a routine scanning procedure, balancing on a stepladder as I hoovered up barcodes on books from the early and mid-00s, I found it. Paul Morley’s Words and Music. I messaged my pal, said the book is yours when I see you next if you still want it. He replied with a cheers. And a big blue thumb.

So, my next thought was that I might finally decide to read it.

I started back at the start – best place – and then easily lapped the bookmark. I’m only in the beginning of the book still, but something feels right about reading this book nearly 20 years on from when it was written. Morley released it as a survey of music at that time, what pop music does to your head, how it lives in there, how you choose to live with it, and he was writing it at the peak of mass-media music consumption. The CD still the thing. But ways existed to hear music online. And to even purchase music to your door without leaving the house. Though it was early days still.

To read about it now feels like a history lesson.

I was working in music retail when I bought the book.

So, to read it now is bringing back all sorts of memories.

I truly believe that the right books find you at the right time. And that you can never have too many (provided you have enough space, and I include in that your mental bandwidth).

Headspace is an important consideration when buying and accumulating books.  While scanning books in the bedroom this weekend – I know, sexy! – I made my wife de-clutter her bedside cabinet. The towers of books there were threatening to never be read. They can be unread somewhere else, because while they’re there beside her they’re taking up some precious headroom.

But sometimes that’s also part of what you want with your library and particularly with your antilibrary, right?

I have a makeshift coffee table next to my favourite chair. It’s topped with recent book purchases, and inside, it contains all of the review copies of books that have recently been sent.

I’ll never get to wipe it fully clean and start again. I’ll only ever move things around, take peeks, get started, change what is on the top of each pile.

And that’s the true beauty of it.

I’m starting to eye up some of the titles there. Not to see what I’ll read next. Rather, to wonder which will be the one that will really take my eye, in about 20 years…