My Antilibrary

Every year since 2016 I’ve made a list of the books I read that year. That list has taken various formats. Since I started writing this blog consistently, I did it for 2022 and 2023. Unfortunately, both of those years were sort of disappointments when it comes to the volume of reading I got done. Well, after a massive post-COVID slump in my reading habits, I finally broke the curse. This year I matched my all-time-high of reading 41 books from back in 2018. Felt pretty good.

When I wrote about my reading habits last year, I said I would “lick my wounds and reflect on how to make more room for reading.” Well, I certainly managed to make more room. As I look back on what made that possible there are two things that I think helped.

Reading books and collecting books are two different hobbies.

In Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, I found a quote that has come to encapsulate how I think about my book collection:

“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)

Where My Time Goes

Last year in chastising myself for only having read 11 books, the fewest in one year since before college I think, I talked about a specific quote from Ryan Holiday about finding more spaces in my life that could be filled with reading:

“You should always have a book with you. Always. People often assume something about me: that I’m a speed reader. It’s the most common email I get. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. The truth is, even though I read hundreds of books each year, I actually read quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow. But what I also do is read all the time. I am always carrying a book with me. Every time I get a second, I crack it open. I don’t install games on my phone—that’s time for reading. When I’m eating, on a plane, in a waiting room, or sitting in traffic in an Uber—I read. There’s no trick, no secret, no shortcut. I like B.H. Liddell Hart’s old line that sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. If you put the time in, you get the results.”

That is, effectively, what I did this year. I deleted Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, and TikTok from my phone and blocked them. The first few weeks I could feel myself jonesing for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. But I persisted. Instead, my Kindle app became my #1 app. It’s what I turn to every time I open my phone. For example, in one particular day my Kindle app was 70%+ of my iPhone usage that day:

But it wasn’t just the time spent on my phone reading. I also created reading opportunities in other spaces in my life.

For example, my wife and I have a routine that I love where we make sure we spend at least a little bit of time together every night. Granted, it got interrupted by our new baby, but we’ll get back into the swing eventually. The routine was every night we put the kids down around 8 PM and then from 8-9 or so we would watch TV. We’ve watched Mr. Robot, Fargo, Succession, The Bear, Veep, Nobody Wants This, and on and on. That’s our time together. Tangentially, my wife and I often listen to audiobooks together on road trips and we had started listening to Lonesome Dove on one drive. So I proposed to my wife that, instead of an hour of TV together every night, what if we did 30 minutes of listening to our audiobook together and then watched TV. That’s where we read Lonesome Dove, Demon Copperhead, and Streets of Laredo.

At night, our bedtime routine with the kids is baths from 7-7:30 or so, which leaves us 30 minutes to read scriptures and say prayers. But we don’t always use that whole time, so my wife has started reading with the kids. That’s where we read The BFG and A Wrinkle in Time. We just switched so that now our 8-year old is reading Harry Potter to us at night.

Finally, my gym routine switched so I’m spending an extra hour early in the mornings on the treadmill so that I can read my Kindle while walking and then an hour in a workout class while listening to audiobooks. That’s where I read The Idea Factory, Brave New World, The Man From The Future, Patriot Games, and Without Remorse.

In Pursuit of Something

One other thing I did wasn’t something I deliberately intended to increase my reading habit, but boy did it. For Contrary Research, we spent a year researching and writing a book about Anduril as a company. More on that to come! As part of going deep on the defense industry, I wanted to read some of the quintessential books. So I read Skunk Works and The Kill Chain. Then I wanted to revisit some fiction I’d read about possible future outcomes in a global conflict between China, Russia, and the US, so I re-read 2034 and then I read the sequel, 2054. Finally, I wanted to go deeper into the rich history of technology and defense during and after World War II, so I read The Idea Factory and The Man From The Future. Finally, I wanted to round out my exposure to some of the key conflict areas, like nuclear weapons and semiconductors, so I read Nuclear War: a Scenario and Chip War.

Again, this wasn’t deliberate. I needed to go deep on defense and I wanted to do the work to read the books. It just so happened that that exercise led me to reading 8 books on the subject. Later, I read an essay by Packy McCormick that touched me deeply, called Read More Books. In it, he perfectly captured the experience I had going deep on defense. He explains the approach this way:

“Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel has this idea about building a “white hot core” when starting a marketplace. The idea is that you shouldn’t try to serve everyone at once, at the beginning, but should begin by nailing the product for a very specific, constrained problem or niche. Prioritize retention over growth. Then, and only then, once your small niche of users really loves your product, you can expand outward into adjacent niches and problems. I’ve always been a little jealous of the way that it seems people like Byrne [Hobart] and Ben Thompson’s brains work. From the outside, it seems like they have a scaffolding in their brain, and then, whenever any new information comes in, they can simply hang it on that scaffolding. That’s why they can write five excellent essays a week when I struggle to write one. I haven’t asked them about this, but what I think is actually happening – other than just raw horsepower – is something similar to Sarah’s white hot core idea. Read a lot of high-quality stuff on a certain topic or time period. Recognize connections, reinforce them, prioritize retention over growth. Then, and only then, once your core is established, expand outward.”

Understanding what “white hot cores” I’m trying to develop is a key way to read more. What do I want to learn more about? And what books would contribute to that knowledge base? And then go nuts.

While defense is certainly the most extensive knowledge core I focused on this year, this is a good segue into something I do every year anyway. But thinking about it through the lens of a “knowledge core” has been instructive. Here are some of the themes inherent in a lot of the reading I did over the course of 2024.

Themes

Reshaping Capitalism

The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Flying Blind, George F. Johnson, Boom

More Fiction

Wind and Truth, Crime & Punishment, Metamorphosis

Epic World-Building

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

Collective Self

Anthem, Story of Your Life

Self-Acceptance

The Courage To Be Disliked, How To Live

Mormon Apologetics

American Zion, Leonard J. Arrington & The Writing of Mormon History, The Book of Mormon, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins

Reading as a Parent

Beyond a tradition of revisiting themes, I have another tradition when it comes to reflecting on my reading. Each year, I always come back to wanting to clearly state how important reading is to me not just as an individual, but as a parent.

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.

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