My Antilibrary
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.
Where My Time Goes
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 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.
Themes
Reshaping Capitalism
The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Flying Blind, George F. Johnson, Boom
I went down a particular rabbit hole out of a fascination with “stakeholder capitalism.” I remember in the first day of my first Finance 101 class, I learned the concept of every company being optimized for “maximizing shareholder value.” That always struck me as odd. Whose to say what shareholders value?
The longer I’ve worked in finance and business building more broadly, the more you appreciate that “stakeholder capitalism” is built on a multi-decade regime of perverse incentives and short-termism. Starting with The Man Who Broke Capitalism, you get an exceptional overview of the gratuitous damage that Jack Welch did to corporate America. Almost single-handedly, he directly or indirectly damaged or irreparably killed a dozen companies, each that were 50+ years old; American institutions. And one guy’s filth-ridden obsession with “maximizing shareholder value” was all it took. Flying Blind is an extension of the same story. A Welchite takes an American institution like Boeing and drives it into the ground.
From there, I was reminded of a story I’d heard on a podcast years ago; George F. Johnson and his Square Deal. As I wrote about it in a few different pieces this year I came across a book written about the shoe empire Johnson built in the early 20th Century and how he represented a fundamentally different vision of capitalism than Jack Welch.
Unfortunately, I’m also eyeballs deep in an AI bubble that puts me in between a double-edge rock and a hard place. Seeing a technology that can be transformational but being run through a system of shareholder capitalism that feeds on a speculative bubble. That led me to Boom to try and wrap my head around the supposed “pros and cons” of bubbles.
Unfortunately, I walked away from that rabbit hole disheartened. The pull of speculative short-termism feels too strong to be avoided by the vast majority of people.
Epic World-Building
Wind and Truth, Crime & Punishment, Metamorphosis, Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, Iron Gold, Dark Age, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, Foundation, Foundation & Empire, Project Hail Mary, The Time Machine, Sunrise on the Reaping
I’ve consistently been trying to read more fiction since a few years ago when someone on Twitter bullied me for sharing my reading list and having read zero fiction. While I’ve had a few spats with some classic fiction, from Dostoevsky to Kafka, but the vast majority of my fiction this year came in the form of science fiction world-building. In fact, almost 50% of the books I read this year were sci-fi. What I’ve noticed is how much I enjoy science fiction that is anchored in our own world, or the fundamental laws of the same. More than alien civilizations, its an extension of humanity’s journey.
I also increasingly want to see more science fiction used as a collective brainstorming exercise. Imagine different versions of the world we live in, and deal with the ramifications. Historical Futurism is the lens I’ve used to think through how past science fiction has done that in the past, but I’m always hungry for a series that sheds light on our own current and future state.
Collective Self
Anthem, Story of Your Life
Speaking of science fiction setups that make me reflect on the world in which we live, one of my favorite TV shows that I watched this year was Pluribus, from the creator of Breaking Bad. I’ve been formulating in my notes a full piece I want to write reflecting on this show, but I’ll summarize my high level thoughts here.
Also slight spoilers for the show, so proceed with caution.
The show opens with the absorption of an alien-based science fair project where humans somehow biologically unlock the ability to form a hive mind. 8 billion merged seamlessly into one conscience. Just ~20 people are left disconnected from the grand collective. One in particular, an author, feels immediately obligated to “save the world” from this collective conscience.
I was immediately bothered by the unapologetic lack of curiosity from the main character. While asking almost zero questions, she immediately sets out to “fix” the problem. As I worked to unpack my own thoughts, I started thinking about some of the stories I’d heard that dealt with similar themes of individuality.
The first was Anthem, from Ayn Rand. Rather than a biological “joining,” this is a cultural suppression of individuality. The story is of a society that has crafted itself around collective uniformity, but its cultural. Not biological. As a result, the story follows a member of the collective who rediscovers the beauty of self.
The second was Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, a quick story that is the source material for the Denis Villeneuve film, Arrival. An alien race arrives on earth and seeks to deliver some kind of “gift.” Over the course of the story, it becomes clear that the aliens influence is effectively providing the ability to view time as non-linear. It’s an incredibly sophisticated take on language, communication, and consciousness.
In my theology, God’s course is “one eternal round.” Like the ring on your finger: without beginning and without end. What if you could experience time in a non-linear fashion? Many a time travel movies have talked about experiencing the physical world in a fourth dimension. The non-linear conceptualization in Story of Your Life has similarities to the idea of a shared conscience. Arrival frames it as a “more perfect communication.”
Pluribus frames this collective conscience as individual lives shared through universal knowledge. Carol, the main character of the show, is convinced that its akin to Ayn Rand’s Anthem; a forced destruction of self. The disappearance of the ego. But consider the framing of the unified non-linear time language of Arrival; what if? What if you had a perfect understanding of past, present, and future? Would there be conflict? I love a quote from the novel, 2034, about global conflict that says:
“Inherent in all wars… was a miscalculation; by their nature it had to exist. That’s because when a war starts both sides believe they can win.”
With perfect understanding… would there be conflict? One of these days, I’ll unpack my whole thought process around the show. More to come.
Self-Acceptance
The Courage To Be Disliked, How To Live
Next up, I had a few books that, for me, revolved around self-acceptance. The Courage To Be Disliked, in particular, was a very important book for me. In fact, I did something I very rarely do. I added it to my Quake Books.
Most of what I took away from this pocket of experience, I think I’ll keep just for me. But I’ll sum up with this. Every problem is an interpersonal problem. So much of life is made more difficult because we’re trying to accomplish other people’s tasks. Our tasks are those whose consequences we are ultimately responsible for. I’m responsible for doing my best, feeling comfortable in my own skin, but I am not responsible for what other people think of me or how they treat me. Shaping my life around those aspects I can control frees me up to actually be useful to my fellow human beings as I enable more capacity.
Mormon Apologetics
American Zion, Leonard J. Arrington & The Writing of Mormon History, The Book of Mormon, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins
Finally, I continued to dig into books in and around Mormon Apologetics. I often feel that religion writ large doesn’t get the intellectual engagement it deserves. Even more so my own religion. People see a goofy con job from a New York farm boy in the 1820s and dismiss it as laughable. In reality, there is a rich and complex cosmology surrounding my belief system. I’m not a blind-eye believer. My intent is to intellectually engage with the difficult questions and try and come to an understanding, rather than just smile and move on.
Reading as a Parent
Finally, I’ll include a section I’ve touched on each time I’ve done this Books in Review thing. What its like to try and put reading front and center in how I raise my kids.
I’ve frequently seen people point to claims like ones in this 2010 study, saying “Books in home as important as parents' education in determining children's education level.” Others saying that even a modest number of books in the home, like 20, can have a material impact on a child’s educational outcomes. I haven’t dug into the data or methodology here so who knows.
But my gut tells me that if you take a couple with children who never read and you drop 20 books in their house it won’t be nearly as impactful as having parents who have actually read 20 books (at least.) My perspective is that its not just the presence of books but of bookishness. The more reading you do as a parent, the more you open up your child’s neurological pathways. The more capable they become of creating new connections, new ideas, and expanding their brains.
So, as I reflect back on my reading from the past year, I do it with that in the back of my mind as well. I’m not just reading for me but so that my kids have a reader as a Dad.
The Books I Read This Year
The best overview of what broke from the early 20th century when America defined what it meant to build things, to the over-financialization of everything in the latter half of the 20th century. More importantly, sent me down a rabbit hole thinking about building vs. harvesting.
On the one hand, this is an extension of the Jack Welch School of Business Harvesting. On the other, it was also an important deep dive into the coming apart of highly regulated industries in the US. There is so much regulatory friction in, and around, how we build things. But that isn’t the culprit of our failure rate. Instead, it’s a perfect compound to be mixed with perverse incentives shaped by shareholder capitalism. The two together make for a highly huckster-friendly ecosystem. Build nothing and harvest as much as possible.
I love the story of George F. Johnson. I want to write a book called “The Forgotten Industrialist” because I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves. He managed to weather the storm of The Great Depression without having to lay anyone off and, at a time when the entire country was unionizing, his workers didn’t feel the need. Unlike Jack Welch who always said he wanted “floating islands” to avoid having to pay labor, George F. saw labor as the asset it was; something worth investing in. The Square Deal was a framework for how to enable workers to live good lives that would, ultimately, make them even more productive.
The final foray into the reinvention of capitalism revolved around bubbles. A private research piece we wrote for Contrary Research unpacked the AI bubble and what the economic incentives are around speculative behavior. The TLDR I walked away with was, despite some optimistic upsides to laying foundations through over-priced investment, the reality is that speculative hucksterism is really difficult for most people to ignore.
Last year was a big Brandon Sanderson year. Now that I’m largely caught up in reading everything he’s published, I’m just reading them as they come out. One of the things I appreciate about this books is that, in part because they’re massive, they leave room for substantial character development. Everything from PTSD and war addiction to addressing childhood trauma and a sizable savior complex.
I’m a big fan of Crime & Punishment. In fact, Russian literature in general has been a big part of my fiction repertoire. In particular, the books concept of an “extraordinary man” has always resonated with me in trying to determine one’s worth. Ultimately, the book ends where it ought to. Not in a meritocratic weighing of worth, but in turning to Christ.
I saw a meme making a joke about Metamorphosis and it made me think. “I guess I genuinely have no idea what that book is about despite it being so famous.” So I read it. And I’m not going to lie. I’m still not sure what it’s about.
I read these books a few years ago, but kept feeling myself pulled to read them again. And I enjoyed them even more the second time. With some flavors of The Hunger Games and Ender’s Game, its an even richer world-building exercise.
The ability of a story to pull you in and make you think you’ve got a handle on what’s going on, and then to completely open up the volume of world-building, yet still keep you hooked is exceptional. What’s more, every book should have more dramatic disappointments.
Finally, the first trilogy ends with a foundation of a lot of critical parts. A lot of times, a world-building book tries to wrap everything up. I very much appreciate that this book did not do that. It dropped massive concepts like solar system-wide civilizations and “the noble lie of democracy,” and then left the door open for future explorations.
The last time I read this series, I really struggled with this book. As much as I loved the first trilogy, there were some things in this one that really broke me and made it hard to hope for a positive outcome. I ended up stopping after this one the first time around. I managed to move on this time, and I’m glad I did.
This one, equally, really made it hard to feel… happy. But I, once again, stuck with it. And I do enjoy it. There are some exceptional pieces of the story digging into hard concepts. Its just that its also so very littered with very, very sad things.
Last year, I read the first book in The Murderbot Diaries. Clearly, I liked it, because I then read the other six books in the series. Each one is a pretty direct continuation from the prior book. What is consistent is Murderbot’s internal reflection on balancing safety, his overwhelming capability, and his struggle with his confusing emotions as a non-human bot.
The adventures of Murderbot as he wanders around to the far corners of a universe where consequences have been abandoned creates a compelling way to explore the world-building while also having a sort of “monster of the week vibe” ala Power Rangers.
The first few books do a good job establishing Murderbot’s character and quandary. Starting with Exit Strategy, it expands even more to encapsulate his relationship with specific humans as well. That enables not just world-building, but a deeper emotional connection to the world around them.
Later in the series, you start to see characters resurface from prior books. That not only enables a deeper read on those characters, but also starts to bring Murderbot’s worlds together. Again, you get to simultaneously explore the world-building while also getting a deeper and deeper sense of each particular characters.
This book, in particular, has an interesting exploration of morality through medium. So many people see a rogue “SecUnit” or bot as a fundamentally horrifying thing. They’ve been conditioned with nothing but fear for that condition. But when met with human horrors, like human trafficking, you see the people of this particular world react with much more moral ambiguity. It lets morality become a dividing line, not humanity.
Finally, as you’ve established a character with Murderbot that you empathize with and feel like you understand, you start to see components of humanity introduced for a non-human character. Like trauma. And what that looks like when you’re talking about biological parts wrapped around a digital system.
There are some things I’m embarrassed that I’ve never consumed. For example? I’ve never seen The Godfather. Even though I’m a massive film nerd… I’ve just never seen it. I feel the same about Foundation. How I can enjoy science fiction as much as I do, and yet have never read it until now? I’m embarrassed. The, sort of, anthology approach to different stories within the same developing world is really the only way you can tell a story that spans tens of thousands of years.
One evolution from the first book, I enjoyed this one because you get a sense of a forming myth. People starting to see what was reality fade from history then to myth, and how people’s worldviews are shaped around that.
I very much enjoyed The Martian. I, particularly, appreciate Andy Weir’s approach to trying to take an unexpected premise and shape it with as much believable reality as possible. This one took a pretty intense turn, even more than the “growing plants on Mars” rendition from The Martian.
Another movie that, while generally reviewed unfavorably, is one I always enjoyed and also think about often, is the 2002 rendition of The Time Machine. I’ve read the book its based on before, but revisiting it fit nicely into my science fiction world-building obsession this year. Wells’ speculations around how a world so effectively bifurcated into an underground cannibalistic work-horse species and a docile, unproblematic love-child above-ground species? That reflection was instructive.
Along the world-building lines, I respect Suzanne Collins’ approach to adding context to the Hunger Games world that she built. Unlike J.K. Rowling, I think she’s done it relatively slow and deliberate. And, as a result, I find myself curious about the conceptual interconnections she weaves together.
I very much love the movie, Arrival. I’ve written about it before. I think about it often. The idea of a perfect form of communication does feel like it would encapsulate a non-linear view of time. If you knew how things really started and how they were going to turn out, you would have significantly less to disagree with in the moment. This story does a perfect job of telling a compelling story primarily through concepts like language, communication, culture, and meaning.
I honestly didn’t have any expectations going into this book. I came across it as I was searching through different ideas around Pluribus. But it was quite good; a perfect nugget for the rabbit hole I found myself going down around identity and self. In contrast to the massive 600+ page books I’m used to reading in science fiction, this relatively brief story kept it to the punchiest details. But I found myself wanting more. There are mysteries left in-world that I want more context around because it would inform other aspects of my takeaway.
Every problem is an interpersonal problem. So much of life is made more difficult because we’re trying to accomplish other people’s tasks. Our tasks are those whose consequences we are ultimately responsible for. I’m responsible for doing my best, feeling comfortable in my own skin, but I am not responsible for what other people think of me or how they treat me. Shaping my life around those aspects I can control frees me up to actually be useful to my fellow human beings as I enable more capacity.
Before I get to The Courage To Be Disliked, I read How To Live. First, what I most enjoyed was Sivers’ efforts to draw out the contrast in critical ideas. It reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
Second, I came across this idea: “All misery comes from dependency. If you weren’t dependent on income, people, or technology, you would be truly free.” Coupled with The Courage To Be Disliked’s idea of “Every problem is an interpersonal problem,” it opens up a similar contrast around whether dependency is freeing or freedom-reducing.
As much as I appreciate The Black Swan for introducing me to the antilibrary concept that really defined my information consumption this year, I struggled with this book. There is a massive amount of high quality information, so I’m confident its not the quality of the book thats in question. But I find that my brain often goes looking for a story. Not just a narrative-driven flow, but an ideological evolution of how A leads to B leads to C. So much of the information in this book felt disjointed. Generally revolving around prediction and the folly of forecasting. But there was not really an A leads to B leads to C.
Speaking of my antilibrary, I have two books on my shelf that I want to read, which go hand-in-hand. (1) America’s Constitution: a Biography and (2) …I can’t remember it; I’m not at home. But its something like Founding Documents as Ancient Scripture or something. Anyways, those books draw me to an idea where I’m curious for the narrative around the critical documents of our founding. But this wasn’t a great contribution. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Walter Isaacson. But this felt like a book for the sake of a book ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. It didn’t satiate my appetite for founding document lore.
There are many attempts to tell the story of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For such a relatively short book, I thought this one did an exceptional job touching on the critical through lines in each generation of the Church’s existence. While there are dozens of sub-topics that merit deeper exploration, this is a very good overview.
Leonard J. Arrington was the Church Historian of the LDS Church for many years and is one of the most important figures in understanding Church history. This biography was particularly good because, rather than being a travelogue of the subject’s life, it took turns topically and used Arrington’s life as a backdrop for specific characteristics and elements of the Church. My Church is continuously doing a better job at trying to answer core questions, rather than avoid them. But that wasn’t always the case, and unfortunately, Arrington got the brunt of a lot of that fear.
Starting in May, I set a goal to read 18 verses every day in The Book of Mormon, which allowed me to finish it in 6 months. One of the living Apostles in our Church gave the advice about selecting a particular question in mind and reading The Book of Mormon focused on that question. I’ve done that now 3-4 times, and each time its instructive.
I’ve already said that I am very committed to having an open mind and trying to unpack the questions around my Church and faith analytically. So hopefully it doesn’t come off as dismissively biased when I say this isn’t a particularly good book. The author is clearly jaded by particular Church history he didn’t like or understand, and set out to craft a narrative that justified his displeasure. Every time I read something where I thought “that doesn’t seem right,” I would go read the primary sources and realize they were drastically mischaracterized. We’ve got plenty of deep questions to swim in when it comes to “Mormonism” so called. But this guy was more inclined to dwell on questions that are relatively shallow.