What Does Your TBR Pile Say About You?

Many readers know the benefits of reading: it is good for your mental health, it can help you through grief, it is said reading makes us better lovers, and reading helps us be be more empathetic and adventurous.

We may see our towering TBR (to be read) piles as a sign of failure as we may never get through them all in our lifetime but studies have shown that a huge TBR pile is actually a positive thing. The act of collecting books in order to read them and learn from them is all part of a need to be a lifelong learner.

Credit: Cinderella in Rubber Shoes on Tumblr

Writer John Coleman has blogged for Harvard Business Review about why he believes learning is a lifelong habit to encourage- and how school is not the only place to be actively studying. From Queen Elizabeth I to Albert Einstein, many note-worthy names have professed their love for reading and learning, and many of them had extensive TBR piles. The need to read and a yearning for learning is something most Reading Addicts have in common, and none of us should be ashamed of an overflowing library.

It is the intense need to keep your brain cells buzzing that drives us, and is what keeps us buying yet another book before we have even started the last ten we purchased. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, reflects on the work of Umberto Eco, and praises the towering TBR, calling it the antilibrary.

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopaedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that 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 allows 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.”

The idea of an antilibrary is to fuel the sense of a continued learning. Your library may be full of texts you have yet to pick up but they are full of information you are dying to learn. That yearning is what sets you apart from the average Joe who is content in his own ignorance. The Greek philosopher, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, expresses how: “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” The act of merely wanting to know more, and knowing you do not know all you could, is what pulls you from the cave.

Readers do not tend to relish in their own ignorance, but are instead pulled to another book and another new subject to research, and know they are never truly sated.

Your TBR pile is a physical representation of your passion, your dedication, and shows your mind is open to discover what you do not yet know.

Add Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s boxset of investigative books to your already groaning TBR pile. The set contains Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and the expanded edition of The Bed of Procrustes.

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