It is pretty likely that there are several books that you own and keep on your bedside table. Half of them you have bought due to the pure enthusiasm for the book. Others you got because the book was mentioned somewhere in a podcast. No judgment! But there is an awkward truth that your overflowing IKEA KALLAX does not want to hear: having more books does not make you a well-read person. It makes you a collector of guilt.
Getting yourself a small, but important library is all about curating. It means buying one book instead of six at Powell’s – that really hurts. Think of it as of a pre-made meal prep for your intellectual life. Would you buy forty pounds of groceries for one week? No, right?
The major misunderstanding of most grad students is the difference between accumulation and curation. The professor’s office is impressive because every single book in it has been read, annotated, and discussed. That copy of Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” is not decoration at all. There are the coffee stains, annotations in three colors, and the cover that cracked because of slapping that book open while arguing about its content in an extremely heated seminar discussion. This is how the serious library looks like.
You should begin with a shelf with about forty books. Yes, forty. The limitation will make you make choices and, honestly speaking, people think much better inside a box. Your library should be able to provide you with an answer to the following question: what books will I grab before firefighters arrive in case my apartment catches fire? Any book that cannot pass this test should be returned to the library immediately.
The good small library is layered. The foundation of the library is five to eight books that you return to every year, that shape your way of thinking in your field. For the literature student, these books may be Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Theory of Prose”. For the political scientist, the foundation is Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” placed next to James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”. Those are not recommendations. Just examples of the library foundation – the books that teach you something new every fifth time you read them.
The next layer is your working shelf. These are the books related to your current research, your dissertation, or your side projects. They get rotated; when you finish a chapter, some of them get returned to the library, some get transferred to your colleagues. This forced leanness of your working shelf gives you an opportunity to concentrate on the book you are reading and not on twelve others that you are planning to read in a week or two or three.
The third layer is the wild card shelf. There are one to five books that have nothing to do with your research whatsoever. It may be a novel you’ve got at a party, or an unusual history of salt, or Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” because you’ve seen it at Raven & Co. and your hand got the book before your mind did. The wild card shelf protects you from being a certain type of grad student that reads only within a ten feet range of his dissertation topic. Nobody likes that grad student at dinner parties.
The bad news that your wallet already expected. Good books cost a lot, and your stipend is not that generous at all. But there is a trick: buy used books aggressively. ThriftBooks, BetterWorldBooks, and your campus used bookstore are your best friends. The 1985 copy of Michel Foucault’s “The Archaeology of Knowledge” with someone else’s annotations is actually better than the pristine one, since those margin notes are basically free tutoring. AbeBooks is another treasure of academic texts available cheaper than cover price.
About editions. There is no need to have the newest printing of “Capital”. The Penguin edition of Marx from 1990 contains the same text as the one from 2024 edition. What you should be looking for is the best translation or the most useful introduction, and that information lives on the forums like r/askphilosophy or in your advisor’s inbox. Just send the email. Advisors love getting requests for reading recommendations because it means that somebody actually pays attention to them.
There is one more thing about purchasing: stop impulse ordering of books at 2 AM because some Twitter thread made you feel ignorant. It is not curiosity. It is an anxiety in disguise. If a book sounds interesting enough to you after a week of sleeping on it, then you should add it to your short list. After the month of short list’s existence, you can purchase the book. Such strategy saved me about four hundred dollars and the whole shelf of unread theory books that I never needed.
Physical versus digital is the debate worth solving early. For your core collection, the physical option wins. You need to be able to underline, to dog-ear pages, and to pile them where you can see them. Visual proximity creates intellectual pressure, and that is the good kind. Everything else goes to Libgen and university library. Kindle is great for reading on the bus, but nobody has ever been transformed by a book that was read half of on the bus and scrolled Instagram on the other half. 😏
Showcase your library intentionally, regardless of how small your apartment is. Even the shelf with a bunch of books sorted by the theme, color, or any other criteria communicates something. Guests notice. Potential dates notice. The advisor, if he visits, definitely judges you based on what is on that shelf, and should.
The real flex is not the number of books that you own. It is the number of books you can discuss with depth, with texture, with actual opinions you’ve developed while staying with a text and not skimming through it. The fifty books collection that you can discuss every single one of them for fifteen minutes beats five hundred books collection where you can remember only the cover art and maybe the first chapter. This is not elitism. It is just math.
There is one trick that works surprisingly well: write an index card for each finished book. Title, author, date of reading, and one paragraph of what it has taught you. Keep those cards in a shoebox. In case you revisit that book years later, you will have the record of who you were when you’ve first met that book, and that is actually moving experience that cannot be replicated in any Goodreads review format.
The twenties and thirties are the period when your intellectual taste is formed. It is exciting and terrifying at the same time. The books that you will choose to keep near you right now will shape your thinking for decades ahead. Thus, choose wisely. Choose with opinions. And for the sake of everything, stop buying books you think you should read and start buying the ones that make you stay up late at night, arguing with the margins.