A library is not only what it contains, but also what it excludes. The act of choosing a book is never neutral. It shapes the architecture of your mind. You must be ruthless in this.
Do not pick books because they are fashionable, praised in glossy magazines or forced upon you by the noise of the social media. These are empty calories, leaving you no wiser than when you began.
Beware especially of those promising quick success, instant enlightenment or the illusion of productivity. They clutter the shelves and impoverish your spirit.
Choose instead the books that resist you, that demand attention. Choose books that slow you down, unsettle you and force you to return.
In fiction, prefer those that deepen your sense of life rather than merely decorate it. Try Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. You can’t skim these books; they demand your rapt attention.
In nonfiction, select works that reveal the structure of reality, not those that reduce it to slogans or easy formulas. Try Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, or Alfred Lansing’s Endurance.
A book that makes you think or challenge your assumptions is always worth more than one that makes you nod in agreement.
Reading, after all, is not consumption, it is construction. Each volume admitted into your library becomes a brick in the proverbial edifice of your thought.
The wrong books clutter the framework, the right ones strengthen it.
If your shelves are filled with shallow works, they will collapse under their own weight. But even a modest library, chosen well, can become a cathedral of the mind.
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