Good books are antifragile

I carry a large wheeled suitcase mostly filled with books on almost all my travels. It is heavy (books that interest me when I travel always happen to be in hardcover).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Books figure prominently in the life of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute, as they do in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Let's consider some of the fascinating things he says about books.

I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself.

His point is that libraries "should not be the source of any idea," at least not after he has started writing. He does not want to write anything he has not previously studied, digested and made his own.

Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfazed badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book.

This is an idea Taleb might have found in a library, for it has been noted many times before. Yet it is amazing how it never seems to occur to those determined to ban or otherwise discourage the reading of certain books. Such actions always call attention to those books (or movies) and attract people who otherwise might have ignored them. Bad reviews, although most authors hate them, serve the same purpose. They attract attention. Most books get almost no attention at all, so a bad review can have a positive impact on sales.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it -- books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.

This probably needs no comment. But I do love the phrase about books having "a secret mission and ability to multiply." That certainly seems to be the case.

What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

I'm not sure this is strictly true. I learned basic math and history, as examples, from textbooks, and I remember what I learned even if I have forgotten those textbooks. Yet I do have more vivid memories of my extracurricular reading and what I learned from these books. Unfortunately most students read only what has been assigned, if that.

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years.

Books "age in reverse," Taleb says. To Kill a Mockingbird has a longer life expectancy now than when it was published 54 years ago. Most books disappear from bookstores within weeks after they appear. If people don't buy them, the stores stop trying to sell them and publishers give no thought to subsequent editions. In 1964 Harper Lee's novel would have seemed to be one of these books. Instead it caught on big with readers, got made into a great movie and quickly became a classic. People may still be reading it a century from now.

Books that are one year old are usually not worth reading.

Books that are a year old actually have some staying power, just not enough for Taleb. For him, C.S. Lewis and a few others, books have to age much longer than that to have great value. So many books once thought to have been important have eventually fallen away. Taleb prefers books that have survived centuries. If they are still in print after all that time, they must have something important to tell us.

Asked by one of his students for a rule on what to read, he replied, "As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years." Obviously I don't subscribe to the first part of that comment, or I would not have read Taleb's book. The second part seems wise however.  Historians do best when they have no memories or prejudices, political or otherwise, to color their writing. It is still probably too soon for a really good history of the Watergate era, but we have seem some good studies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.