Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. Mario Vargas Llosa

I have always loved books.

Not casually, not occasionally; but with something close to devotion.

Since my tender age, books have had a strange pull on me. Not just intellectual, not just aesthetic, almost spiritual.

There was something in the weight of them,

the silence they carried,

the promise that somewhere inside,

a sentence might change the way I see the world.

I didn’t just read books. I felt them…

As I grew older, this attachment turned into something more deliberate.

I began to build my own library, in fact I built libraries wherever I settle.

Wherever I went, I carried that impulse with me.

When life was unstable, books were constant.

When I became more sedentary, they began to accumulate, quietly at first,

then insistently.

Shelves filled up.

Then, new shelves appeared.

And then, corners of rooms started to transform.

But what I remember most is not just the books themselves.

I remember how each one arrived.

I can almost recall:

* The first time I heard about a title

* The moment I decided I had to find it

* The small calculations: can I afford it now or should I wait?

* The place where I finally bought it

A dusty second-hand shop.

A crowded book fair.

A forgotten corner of a library sale.

An unexpected listing online.

Each book has a story.

Not just the one written inside, but the one that brought it to me.

And in a way, my library became a memory system.

A map of my intellectual journey, yes, but also of my life:

where I was,

what I was searching for,

what I could afford,

what I thought mattered at the time.

For a long time, I believed something simple:

That this library was mine.

That it reflected my curiosity, my disciplines, my choices.

Until, slowly, a doubt began to emerge.

What if my choices were not as free as I thought?

When Books Start Looking Back at You

At some point, I began to notice patterns.

Why did certain authors appear again and again on my shelves,

while others were completely absent?

Why did some regions of the world feel intellectually familiar to me,

while others remained distant, even though I had been reading for years?

Why did certain ideas feel “natural,” almost obvious, while others seemed foreign,

difficult, or even unnecessary?

That’s when I started to understand something unsettling.

My library was not just something I had built.

It was something that had been quietly shaping me in return.

The Illusion of Neutral Taste

We like to think that we choose books freely.

But do we?

The philosopher Michel Foucault would argue that what we consider “knowledge” is always structured,

organised through systems that decide what is important and what is not.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

My library, which I thought was purely personal, was in fact:

* Influenced by what was available

* Shaped by what was recommended

* Constrained by language

* Filtered by what I had been exposed to

Even my curiosity had boundaries.

And those boundaries were not entirely mine.

When Economics Enters the Room

Then came another realisation, perhaps even more unsettling.

My library was also an economic object.

Every book I owned was the result of:

* A budget decision

* A trade-off

* A moment where I chose this over something else

Some books I delayed for months.

Others I bought impulsively.

Some I found cheaply in second-hand shops, others I paid for at a premium because I couldn’t wait.

Without realising it, I had been managing a portfolio of knowledge.

Each book was an investment:

* Some paid off immediately

* Others remained unread, waiting

* Some turned out to be less valuable than expected

And suddenly, my library looked less like a romantic collection,

and more like a financial strategy under uncertainty.

The Books I Never Bought

But the most important part wasn’t what I owned.

It was what I didn’t own.

The books I never encountered.

The authors I was never introduced to.

The ideas that never crossed my path.

In econometrics, we would call this omitted variable bias.

And it applies here perfectly.

Because what is missing from my library doesn’t just sit outside it.

It shapes everything inside it.

Culture, Power, and the Invisible Hand Behind my Shelves

This is where the work of Edward Said started to make uncomfortable sense to me.

He showed how knowledge itself, what gets written,

published, translated, and circulated, is not neutral.

It reflects power, history, and sometimes domination.

So even before I chose my books,

something else had already chosen what was available for me to choose from.

My library, in that sense, was not just personal.

It was part of a much larger system.

The Library as Inheritance

Then comes the social dimension.

Not everyone has the same relationship with books.

Not everyone has access to them in the same way,

at the same time,

or with the same ease.

Pierre Bourdieu would call this cultural capital.

And once you see it, it becomes obvious:

Some people inherit libraries.

Others have to build them from scratch.

Some grow up surrounded by books.

Others discover them late, if at all.

And that difference changes everything.

A Quiet Shift in Perspective

So I began to look at my library differently.

Not with less affection but with more awareness.

It is still a place of curiosity, of discovery, of personal history.

But it is also:

* A structure of choices

* A record of constraints

* A reflection of influences I did not fully control

And perhaps most importantly:

A reminder that what feels deeply personal is often, in part, collectively shaped.

The Library as a Map of Ignorance

The Italian thinker Umberto Eco once argued that the true value of a library lies not in the books one has read, 

but in those one has not.

This idea overturns, indeed, the conventional logic of accumulation.

A private library is not a monument to knowledge,

It is a structured exposure to ignorance.

Unread books are not failures; they are latent possibilities.

Final thoughts

I still love books. That hasn’t changed.

If anything, this realisation has made that relationship deeper, more intentional.

Because now, when I look at my shelves, I don’t just see what is there.

I also think about what is missing.

And that, strangely, might be the most important part of all.

Resources

1- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and How to Travel with a Salmon: reflections on semiotics, reading, and libraries.
2-Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1970): knowledge, classification, and epistemic power.
3- Edward Said, Orientalism (1978): power, knowledge, and the structuring of cultural discourse.
4- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984): cultural capital, social reproduction, and symbolic power.
5- https://artpictures.club/autumn-2023.html 6- https://medium.com/@suleymankoc/umberto-eco-on-unread-books-in-a-personal-library-d4d3d69d25eb