Bookshelf
This is where I keep track of other people's reading lists, recommendations, and that special category of aphorisms and witticims dedicated to reading and the curation of libraries. Recommendations welcome!
My reading
I track my reading with this spreadsheet.
Aphorisms
A lot of great things have been said about books, how best to read, and the curation of one's (anti-)library. Here are some of my favourites:
Kathryn Shulz
'Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&Ms.'
Georges Perec
'Bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat rests and as lumber rooms.'
John Milton
'A good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.'
Carl Sagan
'What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.'
Schopenhauer
'In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad for life is short, and both time and strength is limited.'
'Writers can be divided into meteors, planets and fixed stars. The first produce a momentary effect: you gaze up, cry: "Look!"—and then they vanish forever. The second, the moving stars, endure for much longer. BY virtue of their proximity they often shine more brightly than the fixed stars, which the ignorant mistake them for. But they too must soon vacate their place, they shine moreover only with a borrowed light, and their sphere of influence is limited to their own fellow travellers (their contemporaries). The third alone are unchanging, standing firm in the firmament, shine by their own light and influence all ages equally, in that their aspect does not alter when our point of view alters since they have no parallax. Unlike the others, they do not belong to one system (nation) alone: they belong to the Universe. But it is precisely because they are so high that their light usually takes so many years to reach the eyes of dwellers on Earth.'
Francis Bacon
'Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.'
Umberto Eco
‘It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already-read books and do not think of the library as a working tool. But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning, and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.’
On how best to answer when someone asks, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?”
‘The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydig: “And more, dear sir, many more,” which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: “No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office,” a reply that on the one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure.’
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
‘The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means . . . 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.’
'Thinking you have to read all the unread books on your shelves before buying new ones is like thinking you should drink everything in the cellar before buying any new bottles. Some books just need a bit of shelf-time before they (/you) are ready'
Rebecca Solnit
'The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.'
Kafka
'I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.'
Chritopher Waltz
'Comedy is like a cigar; it has to be exquisite to be any good.'
Kierkegaard
'What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself, and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.'
Clive James
'If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.'
Samuel Johnson
'The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.'
'A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.'
'A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?'
C.S. Lewis
'Most of us do not believe that Dante’s universe is at all like the real one. Most of us, in real life, would judge the emotion expressed in Donne’s Apparition to be silly and degraded; even, what is worse, uninteresting. None of us can accept simultaneously Housman’s and Chesterton’s views of life, or those of Fitzgerald’s Omar and Kipling. What then is the good of—what is even the defence for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist—on Dante’s earthly paradise, Thetis rising from the sea to comfort Achilles, Chaucer’s or Spenser’s Lady Nature, or the Mariner’s skeleton ship?
The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We are not content to be Leibnitzian monads. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. one of the things we feel after reading a great work is “I have got out.” Or from another point of view, “I have got in”; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside.'
'In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; “he that loseth his life shall save it”.'
If we take literature in the widest sense, so as to include the literature both of knowledge and of power, the question “What is the good of reading what anyone writes?” is very like the question “What is the good of listening to what anyone says?” Unless you contain in yourself sources that can supply all the information, entertainment, advice, rebuke and merriment you want, the answer is obvious. And if it is worth while listening or reading at all, it is often worth doing so.
Henry Oliver
'Find as many books as possible that you can re-read every decade. You are looking for writing that you will never get over.
'Memorise the things you love. Wallow. Swoon. When you are walking down the street and feel overcome with a line of Wallace Stevens just say it out loud to yourself. Why not? One day you’ll be dead and you won’t get the chance. Listen to poets reading their own work wherever possible. Chant it to yourself.
How high that highest candle lights the dark!'
Wallace Stevens
'The reader became the book; and summer night was like the conscious being of the book.'
Harold Bloom
'You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.'
'For reading there will never be enough time.'
'There is a reader's Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call "falling in love." I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.'
Nietzsche
'That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts.'
G.K. Chesterton
'Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange.'
'People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. '
'Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even are cognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, “to be continued in our next.” '
'If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine.'
Jane Austen
'The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.'