Tsundoku (積ん読) is a beautiful Japanese word describing the habit of acquiring books but letting them pile up without reading them.

I used to feel guilty about this tendency, and would strive to only buy new books once I had finished the ones I owned. However, the concept of the antilibrary as explained by Nassim Nicholas Taleb has completely changed my mindset when it comes to unread books.

Unread books can be as powerful as the ones we have read, if we choose to consider them in the right light.

He says a good library is filled with read and mostly unread books.

A library full of unread books is a reminder to the owner to be humble because he doesn’t know much because of experts who have written on a number of subjects.

As Grant Snider illustrates in the above comic strip, reading requires time, less distractions and more discipline.

The more you read, the more you realise how much you don’t know.