Buy the Books You’ll Never Read

I have more books than I will ever realistically finish in my lifetime, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Some sit proudly on bookshelves. Some are stacked on side tables. Others live inside my Kindle under embarrassingly optimistic collections with names like Read Soon or For Vacation as though I’ve somehow become the kind of person who quietly lounges by a pool reading dense nonfiction for six uninterrupted hours. There are books I bought because someone recommended them, books I bought because I thought they would make me smarter, books I bought because I wanted to become the kind of person who reads books like that, and a handful I purchased late at night while temporarily convinced that mastering Roman history or understanding behavioral economics was about to become my entire identity.

For a long time, I felt guilty about those unread books.

Every time I walked past them, I saw unfinished projects and broken promises. It felt wasteful. Why buy books if you aren’t reading them? Why own things that sit untouched? There’s a strange little shame that creeps in when you realize your curiosity seems to be outpacing your actual available time. Meanwhile, every finished book somehow produces three more books you suddenly think you need.

But I’ve started wondering if maybe we’ve been thinking about unread books completely backward.

Years ago, writer and scholar Umberto Eco reportedly kept a personal library so massive that visitors would constantly ask him the same question: How many of these have you actually read? On the surface, it feels like a fair question. But the more I think about it, the stranger it sounds.

Nobody walks into somebody’s kitchen and asks why they own ingredients they haven’t cooked with yet. Nobody opens a closet and questions why someone owns jackets for weather that hasn’t arrived. We understand instinctively that having options isn’t wasteful. It’s preparation. Yet somehow with books, people often act as though ownership only counts if completion follows.

That idea shifted for me when I learned about the concept writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls an antilibrary. The idea is simple: the books you’ve already read represent knowledge you already possess. The unread books represent possibility. They hold questions you haven’t asked yet, ideas you haven’t encountered, and versions of yourself you haven’t grown into.

That hit me harder than I expected.

Because if I’m honest, I don’t want to become the person who believes he already knows enough.

At this stage of life, I’m becoming less interested in collecting answers and more interested in collecting curiosity. When I was younger, I thought reading was about becoming informed. Now I think reading is often about staying open. Every good book seems to reveal ten more things I don’t know. The more I learn, the more fascinating the world becomes.

The Japanese actually have a word for buying books and not reading them: tsundoku.

I love that because the word feels surprisingly kind. It doesn’t carry the judgment that English often puts onto habits like this. It recognizes something very human. Buying books is not always about consuming information immediately. Sometimes it’s about optimism. Sometimes it’s about believing that your future self deserves access to ideas your current self isn’t ready for yet.

When you buy a cookbook, maybe you’re imagining becoming someone who cooks more. When you buy a memoir, maybe you’re imagining becoming more adventurous. When you buy a giant intimidating history book, maybe you’re imagining slower evenings, fewer distractions, and more room to think. Whether or not you open the book tomorrow isn’t always the point.

There’s also something else I’ve noticed.

The people I know who stop buying books altogether, who stop being curious, who stop exploring new ideas and assume they’ve seen enough of life, often seem to become smaller versions of themselves. Their worlds narrow. Their conversations repeat. Their sense of wonder fades.

I don’t want that.

I want to keep shelves around me that quietly remind me there are still places I haven’t visited, perspectives I haven’t considered, and ideas I haven’t wrestled with yet. I want my environment to suggest that there is more ahead than behind.

That means I’ve changed how I think about reading.

I buy books ahead of where I am. I let myself put books down without guilt. I’ve stopped treating unfinished books like failures. Sometimes page 40 simply means not now. Sometimes the book arrives before the version of you who needs it.

And I’ve stopped performing reading for other people.

Nobody wins because they completed the most classics or cleared the largest reading list. The point was never to finish everything. The point was always to remain interested.

So if somebody walks into your house, looks at your shelves, and asks how many books you’ve actually read, you don’t have to apologize.

Smile.

Tell them enough.

Then keep the unread ones.

They’re the proof you still believe there’s more to discover.