One concept that stuck with me from The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb was the antilibrary. The idea was that instead of having a personal library of books that you have read, to have one with books that you have not.

From 2015, when I read that book, until fall 2022, it stayed largely in the back of my mind. But when I joined a new company that offered an annual $1,000 stipend for “learning and development”, I was stumped on what to spend it on.

I didn’t want to…not use it. But $1,000 was a very generous amount and aside from an O’Reilly Media (library of largely technical books) subscription and a few paid newsletters, I had several hundred dollars remaining.

So I decided to buy books. I checked with someone from the company first for approval, and placed an order for 35 books. Mostly books on business, some on psychology or philosophy. The books were supposed to connect to work in some way, of course.

Honestly, I hadn’t read as much as I liked the few years prior, so I set an ambitious goal for 2023. I would read 52 books. These goals are often counterproductive for people, so I tried to be mindful of that. But I just wanted to reactivate the muscle. I finished 2023 having read 40 books, pretty good for a year where I moved across the country and got a concussion.

I liked having a stack of books to choose from. Sometimes I’d be curious about a topic or hear about a book on a podcast, and I would just walk back to my room and have the book handy to start immediately.

But I grew tired of business books. Part of buying the books I bought was that I thought I had been reading the wrong business books. The case study, pop science, essay-based books couldn’t hold my attention. Most could be a blog post. A lot of them should.

Recently I’ve leaned into books that shouldn’t be a blog post. Books that keep me engaged. Books with a narrative. I find having a narrative helps my brain organize the information better, and it offers a compelling reason to keep reading.

For example, you figured the guys in Pirate Hunters would find the pirate ship. But learning about their process made you appreciate the twist at the end. In contrast, a third of the way through Drive I thought, eh I get it.

In the last 180 days before sitting down to write this, I’ve purchased 48 books and borrowed several more from the Santa Monica Public Library.

Most of this year’s haul are narrative-based. Lots of history. Lots of exploration (Endurance, The Lost City of Z). And a lot of books about business history, I guess you’d call it. Not trumpeting a certain company’s approach or philosophy, just saying what happened. Those are apparently the business books I can stomach. Not so much the essays and treatises.

Switching over to books I found more interesting, and making them more available when I was in the right mindset to read, led me to read more.