Once upon a time, when I ran upon a gap in my reading, I felt guilty about it. But no longer. As the moodiest of mood readers, I have come to see my towering to-be-read (TBR) pile and those gaps as a blessing rather than a threat.
Several years ago, my husband, who reads mostly business nonfiction, gifted me the term “anti-library,” coined by Umberto Eco and popularized by business writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb. An anti-library consists of all the books you collect because you want to read them but somehow you haven’t gotten around to it yet. (Eco’s personal library apparently ran to 30,000 titles, a goal to which I can only aspire.) I think the Goodreads To-Read shelf counts (somehow I have collected over a thousand titles on mine) as well as that list of authors you keep in the back of your head that you are always meaning to read.
“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows 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.”
In SFF, the constant and ever-increasing churn of new books often bumps old titles into the anti-library, because let’s face it, new and shiny is… new and shiny, and many of us (me included) are basically crows. I have moaned the unconquerable state of my TBR, but in times like these, having a large cushion of books can be a lifeline. I’m a firm believer that books come to us when they’re meant to, so if you, like me, have gaps in your reading maybe it’s because the time wasn’t right to read those books yet.
That used to be me and Tolkien. Admitting I hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings felt like saying I should have my fantasy writer card revoked. But movies aside, meant I got to experience the books for the first time with my dyslexic son as he listened to the books on audio over and over again. Later, when I read the books aloud to my younger kids myself, I was grateful for the gap. It was much more fun to share inside jokes about the Paths of the Dead than it would have been (for me personally) if I had read those books holed up in my room alone.
These days I’m working on a few more authors who have been waiting patiently in my anti-library. Juliet Marillier’s work forms another embarrassing gap for me, since it’s foundational to the kind of romantic, historical fantasy I write. Her debut novel, Daughter of the Forest, used to catch my eye as I wandered bookstores in the early 00s with two small children in tow. I didn’t have much money to buy books of my own back then, and Marillier became that author I never got around to.
Recently, Wolfskin, a much less-known Norse fantasy about a berserker, inexplicably showed up in my Goodreads feed, and I discovered the audiowas included with my Audible subscription. So, Daughter of the Forest remains in my anti-library but I’m listening to Wolfskin as I cook dinner. It has a wonderful, awful sort of beginning, the kind of beginning that makes it easy to imagine you’re sitting around the fire listening to her tell the story on a long winter’s night.
Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower (famously cut into parts because it was over 500,000 words long) has occupied a prominent place in my anti-library for even longer. One of my teenage sons blitzed through the entire Osten Ard universe over the course of a year, but my journey has been much more leisurely.
The hardback copy of The Dragonbone Chair with the shiny gold lettering on the shelves upstairs was a gift I got for Christmas the year it was published. (Do me a favor and don’t do the math, but I was sixteen that year.) By the time To Green Angel Tower (Part 1) came out, I was in college. I spent money I didn’t have on the mass market paperback and tucked it away on my shelves for when I had more time, moving it from one state to another as the years passed. The other day a chance Google search made me realize how much the series I’m currently writing owes to having Williams in my inspirational soup. But I burnt out my eyes reading in the dark exactly like my mom said I would, and now the print in the old mass market paperbacks (with the Michael Whelan covers!) is too small. I could read the books on Kindle, but I feel like I want the physical sensation of paper and weight. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I have opinions about books on shelves and anyway, at this moment in time, it’s good to get away from a screen. So I bought new copies in the trade paperback size and maybe this time they’ll finally move from the to-read shelf to read.
What about indies? I didn’t discover indie fantasy until 2018, so my indie anti-library hasn’t even been around for as long as indie fantasy has been a thing. But not long ago I picked up a book I had been hearing about for several years—Tuyo by Rachel Neumeier. According to Goodreads, this has been on my to-read shelf since 2020. I didn’t really know what to expect from the cover, but when I started reading, I was pleasantly surprised. I like most genres of fantasy—short and long, classic epics, noir urban fantasy and everything in between—but there is a certain kind of epic fantasy that makes something inside me sit up and say, Yes, exactly this! Reading Tuyo, with its deep worldbuilding, political intrigue, rich characterization, and carefully built emotional relationships, has been like that. Good thing too, because I didn’t notice when I started that there are twelve books in the Tuyo series!
There are many more writers in my anti-library—Jennifer Roberson, Jacqueline Carey, Victoria Goddard, L. L. Stephens, Brian Stavely… the list could (and does) go on. I choose to find it comforting rather than overwhelming. The books I haven’t read form a part of me just as much as the books I have read. And what better place to live than a library?
Title image by Aleksei Ieshkin.
Jennie Ivins
Julia Kitvaria Sarene