Bookshelves

Though a quick check showed, barring extreme memory slips, that I have read nearly all of nearly all of the books in my living room, and that probably only drops down to most of most of if I look at all the books I own, I still agree with Ezra Klein on this issue.  Well, apart from not being the sort of person who would read 900 page books on Lyndon Johnson or the Reformation.  So I seem to disagree with him on a lot, really.  But the central point remains; owning books is for showing what sort of person you are, and has relatively little to do with the activity of reading books.  This is regardless of how seriously you take the latter activity, or at least this is so for an academic like me, since I have such easy access to such great libraries.

As for the risk of being embarrassed by being asked about a book you haven't read, which many of the comments on Klein's post seemed to suggest was a decisive reason to avoid having such books on shelves, I find this unconvincing.  There are plenty of books I have read that I couldn't tell you much of anything true about, and I imagine Klein has interesting things he could say about Johnson or the Reformation to deflect the conversation away from the specific contents of those books he hasn't read.