Books To Read
Books To Read
The #books-to-read tag — Kyle’s marker for a book he wants to read but hasn’t yet, the routing signal that feeds the wiki’s anti-library. Across the corpus, when a book surfaces in a clipping, call, essay, or another book’s recommendation, Kyle flags it with this hashtag so it can later become a wiki/books-to-read/ entry. The intellectual case for the practice comes from The Black Swan, where Kyle ties this tag to Taleb’s “antilibrary” — the idea that unread books are more valuable than read ones, a private store of what you don’t yet know.
In practice the tag attaches to specific recommendations: Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery (the lens for “why ideas are different than software today”) in Open-Source Knowledge - Research; Will Thorndike’s The Outsiders in On the Nature of Long-Term Holds; and list articles like 20 Book Recommendations by Top Venture Capitalists, which Kyle tagged #books-to-read but which was filed as a reading-queue item (a list, not a single book) worth mining for individual titles. Note that the canonical anti-library now lives in the dedicated wiki/books-to-read/ folder; this page is the legacy tag-hub that the hashtag resolves to.
Where this appears
- The Black Swan — the “antilibrary” rationale (unread books more valuable than read ones) tied directly to this tag
- 20 Book Recommendations by Top Venture Capitalists — a list article Kyle tagged
#books-to-read, filed as a reading-queue item to mine for titles - Open-Source Knowledge - Research — Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery flagged
#books-to-read - On the Nature of Long-Term Holds — Will Thorndike’s The Outsiders tagged
#books-to-read - Michael Nielsen — Reinventing Discovery referenced as a
#books-to-readitem
Saved references
- Airtable of book recommendations —
https://airtable.com/shrAszzsM1Mxas3QK/...saved April 17th, 2020. [STALE] Checked 2026-08-18 in the browser: “This private share link is no longer available.” No content was recoverable; recorded here so the reference isn’t silently lost. - Hidden gem alert! Here’s a… (tweet) — David Perell’s septivium list, the source of 17 anti-library entries.
From Roam
- Random
- “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Dweck
- John Dewey - “The School and Society.”
- Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone
- Powerful Learning: What we know about teaching for understanding
- Framework for 21st century learning published by the partnership for 21st century skills
- Geo-Literacy Project
- Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
- Mind the laptops by Bruce Johnstone
- https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/071b/ed15bcdcca57dbcd930526943bbe8de772ee.pdf
- ETS iSkills Assessment - measuring 21st century skills
- “The best resource for staying abreast of this fast changing field of online learning is iNACOL, which operates the Online Learning Clearinghouse, a comprehensive effort supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and WestEd”
- Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen
- Liberating Learning by Terry Moe
- Farewell Lecture by Professor Mazur
- National Parks: America’s Best Ideas by Ken Burns
- Don’t bother me mom, I’m learning by Marc Prensky
Referenced in
- 2025 in Books essay
- Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters book
- Charlie Munger: Academic Economics note
- Chip War book
- East of Eden book
- Future Mormon book
- How To Read a Book book
- In Service to the Mouse note
- Investing 101 essay
- Movies to Watch note
- My Library note
- Poor Charlie's Almanack book
- Robert Cialdini note
- Romney: A Reckoning book
- Talent book
- The Black Swan book
- The Self-Driven Child book
- Working in Public book