I Guess I'm Not a Minimalist Book Reader Anymore?

I have a small habit that I only noticed recently. Whenever I finish something (a project, a teaching semester, a long revision, a manuscript submission) I often end up buying a book. Not every time, and never as a rule. I do not have a checklist that says, “Submit paper, buy book.” It is much less deliberate than that. But it keeps happening. Something ends, and a few days later I find myself looking through a bookstore, adding a title to my cart, or finally buying a book I have been thinking about for months. I suppose it has become my quiet way of marking completion.

Work does not always give us a very clear ending. A semester ends, but another one is already waiting. A paper is submitted, but then there may be reviews. A project is completed, but there is usually another document, meeting, or deadline sitting somewhere nearby. There is rarely a dramatic moment when you can say, “That is it. This part is over.” Usually, you just close one file and open another. Sometimes you do not even have time to feel pleased that something is finished because your attention has already moved elsewhere. I think this is one of the strange things about adult working life. We spend so much time anticipating completion, but when it finally arrives, the moment itself can feel surprisingly small. You imagine the relief of finally finishing something, and then suddenly it is Tuesday afternoon and you are answering an email about something completely unrelated. The work that occupied so much mental space has already begun to recede. Buying a book gives that moment a little more shape. Nothing extravagant, nothing particularly ceremonial. Just: this is done, and I am going to buy a book.

I like books as a reward partly because I am slowly building a personal library. For the past few years, that has been a dream of mine. Not necessarily a grand, perfectly designed library with ladders and floor-to-ceiling shelves, although I would not complain about that either. I simply want to be surrounded by books I have chosen over time. Books I have read, books I still mean to read, books connected to certain interests, certain phases, certain versions of myself. I like the idea that a library can be built gradually enough that you almost do not notice it becoming a library. There is something appealing to me about that kind of accumulation. One book does not feel significant. Neither do five. But over the years, choices begin to gather around you. You notice that one shelf has become mostly literature, another history, another design or work-related reading. You see old interests sitting beside newer ones. There are books you bought because you were intensely curious about something for six months, books that changed the direction of your thinking, and books that simply looked interesting on an ordinary Saturday afternoon.

That is probably why buying a book after finishing something does not feel like spending money on a fleeting reward. The reward remains. It joins something I am already building. Of course, this brings up the familiar question of whether we need to own so many books at all. E-books exist, my Apple's Books app is fully functioning and can support that choice. Because, let's face it, some books are read once and never opened again. But a personal library serves a slightly different purpose for me. It is not only a storage system for texts I intend to consume efficiently. It is also an environment. A book sitting on a shelf can continue to invite you long after you buy it. You notice it again six months later and finally open it. You pull out one book and find another beside it that you had forgotten about. A subject you thought you had moved on from suddenly becomes interesting again. Sometimes the value of owning a book is not that you read it immediately, but that it remains available to the person you might become later.

I have become much more comfortable with that idea. I used to feel slightly guilty about unread books, as if every unread spine on the shelf represented some unfinished obligation. Now I think of them differently. A personal library does not need to be a record of books successfully completed. It can also be a collection of possibilities. There are books for the person I am now and books for some future version of me who may one day become interested in a subject I barely understand today. There are books I bought because I knew exactly why I wanted them, and books I bought because something about them suggested that I might need them eventually. Not in a practical sense, necessarily. Just intellectually.

And that is another reason I enjoy buying books after finishing a period of focused work. The book does not have to match what I have just completed. In fact, I often prefer that it does not. After spending weeks on an academic paper, I may want fiction. After a teaching semester, perhaps history. After working on something technical, maybe art, design, essays, or a book I cannot justify in any practical way except that I want to read it. I like that freedom. So much of working life requires directed attention. Read this. Prepare that. Respond to this. Finish that. Even reading itself can become instrumental. You read because you need a citation, because you are preparing a class, because you need to understand a concept well enough to explain it to someone else. Reading has a purpose before you even begin. There is nothing wrong with that. I enjoy a great deal of the reading I do for work. But it is different from standing in front of a shelf and asking, without any immediate objective, what do I want to know about? That question feels surprisingly luxurious. Not what do I need to read. Not what is useful for this project. Not what belongs in this syllabus or literature review. Just: what am I curious about now? Sometimes the answer is a novel. Sometimes it is a subject that has nothing to do with anything I am currently working on. Sometimes it is a very large book that I know perfectly well I am not going to finish quickly. That is fine. I like having parts of my reading life that do not need to justify themselves through productivity.

Perhaps that is also why books feel like a better reward to me than many other things. They do not simply congratulate the person who has just finished something. They also make a small investment in the person who comes next. You finish one piece of work, and the book quietly points somewhere else. Toward another subject, another imagination, another question. There is something hopeful about that.

I do not want to romanticize work too much, and I certainly do not want to make it sound as if every project I finish has been some heroic act of survival. Most of the time, work is simply work. Some parts are enjoyable, some are tiring, some take longer than expected, and some are just things that need to be done. A semester ending does not automatically make it a difficult semester. Submitting a paper does not mean I have emerged from some extraordinary ordeal. But even ordinary effort takes time. That seems worth acknowledging.

I think we are often very good at noticing beginnings and anticipating endings, but not especially good at inhabiting the moment in between. We begin a project with plans and schedules. We spend weeks doing the actual work. Then, as soon as it is complete, our mind reorganizes itself around the next unfinished thing. I am guilty of this constantly. My attention is much better at finding what remains undone than recognizing what is already finished. There will always be another task. Maybe the small ritual of buying a book interrupts that pattern for a moment. It gives completion a physical object. Sometimes, much later, the book keeps a faint memory of that time. I will see one on the shelf and think, oh, I bought this after that semester. Or: this was the book I ordered after I finally submitted that paper. Or: I remember buying this when that project was done. The association is usually not dramatic. It is more like a small annotation in the margin of memory. And I like that.

I do not remember every book this way, of course, and I would not want to. I do not want my shelves to become a professional timeline disguised as a library. Most books are there simply because I wanted them. Some were birthday purchases. Some came from recommendations. Some appeared because I walked into a bookstore with no intention of buying anything and failed completely. But I like that a few of them carry an extra layer of meaning. It also makes me think about how much of what we create through work eventually leaves us. Students graduate. Courses end. Projects are handed over. Documents disappear into folders. A paper enters an editorial system and begins a journey that is no longer entirely ours. Even things that once occupied an enormous amount of mental space eventually become something we rarely think about. The book stays. It comes home. It sits on a shelf. Maybe I read it immediately. Maybe it waits for six months. Maybe I underline half of it. Maybe I move it from one room to another. Maybe years later I cannot remember why I wanted it so badly in the first place. But it remains part of the library.

There is a contrast there that I find strangely satisfying. Much of professional life involves producing things that circulate outward. You teach something, submit something, send something, hand something over. The direction is away from you. A book moves in the opposite direction. It comes back home. Perhaps that is why I like the symbolism of it more than I realized. Some energy went out into the world through work, and something small returned to become part of my own space. Over time, the shelves get fuller. Not because I decided one day to assemble an impressive collection, and certainly not because every book was carefully planned. The library grows because life keeps happening. A project ends. A semester ends. A manuscript is submitted. A period of concentrated work finally loosens its grip on the mind.

A book comes home. Then another.

I also like that this means the library grows at roughly the same pace as my life. It is not something I need to complete quickly. There is no final number of books I am trying to reach. In fact, the idea of a “finished” personal library seems almost contradictory. If I am still reading, still changing my mind, still discovering subjects I know nothing about, then the library should probably remain unfinished too.

Perhaps that is part of its appeal.

A personal library is never only about what you already know. It is also an arrangement of things you have not yet learned. When I look at mine now, I can already see traces of earlier versions of myself. Interests that became important. Interests that faded. Books that shaped later work in ways I could not have predicted when I bought them. Books I still have not read and perhaps should. Books I remember buying vividly, and others that seem to have quietly appeared on the shelves. I imagine that will become more noticeable with time. Years from now, I may look at a book and remember not only what it says, but where I was in my life when I wanted to read it. Maybe I will remember the semester. Maybe the project. Maybe the bookstore. Maybe nothing at all. That is fine too.

A library does not need to preserve every memory clearly. It only needs to have been there while the memories were being made. 

And perhaps that is ultimately why I keep returning to books as my small way of marking an ending. The point is not really the reward. It is not even the idea of collecting. It is the feeling of continuity. Something finishes, but something else is quietly being built. One piece of work leaves my desk. One more book joins the shelf. The professional part of life keeps moving forward, and somewhere alongside it, almost unnoticed, a private intellectual life is accumulating too. Perhaps one day I will look at the shelves and not remember the story behind most of the books. I think I will still like knowing that the library grew alongside everything else, not all at once, and not through one grand plan, but slowly, through curiosity, through ordinary life, and quite often after something else was finally finished.