Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: January 12, 2025

Issue 141

Hello, Readers and Writers!

Have you ever heard of an antilibrary? If you are worried that an antilibrary has something to do with hating books, you can relax because it means the opposite! Statistician and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the term in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which is about how we deal with rare and unpredictable events. Taleb introduces the antilibrary as he discusses the importance of remaining humble in the midst of uncertainty.

Most of us probably have a section of books we can proudly call our antilibrary. The concept refers to the collection of books we own but have not yet read. While at first this might seem like a symbol of our neglect and lack of control in a bookstore, Taleb reframes it as positive—your unread books in your antilibrary serve as a constant reminder of what you don't know and the vastness of knowledge still waiting to be explored. In other words, your antilibrary should excite you with all of the potentia…