Kyle Harrison
concept

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-read item

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