The Home Library as a Hub

“Baba, why do you need so many books?” My five-year-old posed the question like he was the adult in the room. I’d just plucked another tome from the bookcase—Jimena Canales on Bergson and Einstein—and it landed with a thump, on an already crowded table. There was a stack of paperbacks and hardbacks on colonial history, and photography, and scientific objectivity. Plus a large-format MoMA collection laid open on some Rorschach inkblots. A teal Moleskine. A monitor showing a research paper in progress.?

Hence the question, I guess.

“Because the topic I am examining is complex and I want to make sure what I write is true.” He sat opposite me on our makeshift study desk, hands and eyes absorbed in Lego work. Impervious to the occasional supervisory glance his little sister cast at him from her reading spot—the corner of a faux-leather Ikea—and to my reply, I thought. Maybe I should have provided a simpler answer.?

But he responded. “What are you writing about?”

Whatever absorbs and delights parents, their offspring usually inherit. This applies even to so-called “boring stuff”. The Parent’s Tao Te Ching intimates that behaviors are learnt from adults; kids born to readers and raised in a home bustling with books will imitate their parents’ bookish habits. My daughter grabs and flips through my wife’s medical textbooks like Beatrix Potter tales; my son once bestowed his own doodles upon a book on symbolism and animals and was convinced he was annotating. For them to witness, ask about, engage with the written word is not only natural, but also intended.?

We’re not interested in turning them into bibliophiles. Passion for books alone won’t get them far in life. We’re eager to model before their eyes a learning ecosystem in which the act of reading a book is inseparable from other books and events, peers, teachers, and places. The library ties these things together, is a dynamic hub that anchors and sustains and bears the intellectual footprint of its curator’s journey in the realm of thought.?

Think of it as a tactile visual index that silently orchestrates thematic reasoning. It has an observable facet—ushering a concrete flow of identifiable texts in and out of shelves—and a tacit one—working behind the scenes, through osmosis, imprinting its philosophical blueprint on anyone who sticks around long enough. Both contribute to a child’s education.

I shared the Canales story because it illustrates what cannot take place in a digital context. No outsider, let alone young children, can discern user operations on a device unless they peak, with their chin over your shoulder. This is awkward, intrusive, and still tells them zilch considering how screens atrophy most sensorial information that makes spontaneous participation possible. What was I writing? I mustered the courage to depict a single-digit-year-old version of the academic paper in progress. From then on, the kids knew when I was laboring over it; their minds had linked the particular cluster of items on the table that morning with “the paper”. No child can develop a tangible feel for quantity, patterns, or movement; for sophisticated mental associations or good comeback questions if all they see are swipes on a glowing surface.?

I sense skepticism. Think about how a real library differs from its virtual counterpart, from the point of view of child education at home. I reckon had my wife and I been using an exclusively digital library, almost every significant aspect of how we interact with books would have gone unnoticed by our children. They would not know: what I am reading; its size, format, texture, age; whether or not I read multiple books in parallel, the frequency with which I switch between texts, and whether or not this is tied to some observable context; that I often return to the same works; that I don’t always proceed in a linear fashion, and that I return to passages I already read; that I prefer used books because their previous owner could have left insightful notes therein; that I leave marginal commentary; what, where, and how much I comment; how I bookmark, how I index; the first phrase I inscribe, on the title page; the volume of my library; the books I read at home, the ones I take to a coffeeshop, those I travel with; what I read lying down or sitting up, during the day or at night; how their mother and father compare in all those respects; the books on the table or the ones we pull from a shelf when debating some point; how our library is organized; the titles that intrigue visitors; the tome in question when one of us says “read this” and points to some underlined passage.

These are consequential epistemic details that children observe and often ask about. Materiality opens a window to meta-textual and communal dimensions much less obvious—if not wholly absent—in electronic reading. It shows that reading is neither flat nor solitary: thick tomes impress the weightiness of knowledge; seeing the same book over and again suggests its importance—that certain texts must be re-read; poring over the same page for hours working out its mechanics with highlighters and pens demonstrates patience, commitment; book discussions insinuate that peers are essential in clarifying obscurities or consolidating our understanding of a text; and so on. These cues are hard to exhibit with a digital device.

The visibility of books gives children access to paratextual and extratextual signals that gradually build up their theory of knowledge while sensitizing them to a concert of relationships. It brings spatial, temporal, and cyclical awareness right into the development of a child’s epistemology—something digitality typically levels and many schools neglect. With so many commodities black-boxed by design, ready-made, or outright immaterial, practicing old-style, analog reading around children can show them otherwise hidden features of knowledge.

Shortcuts are useful, not when it comes to nurturing a thinking person.

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Turning to the adult beneficiaries; well-structured libraries can also serve as brainstorming tools and mindmaps. Merely looking at shelves prompts a mental retrieval of their textual stock, and more. Try to contemplate a familiar bookcase awhile and it’ll begin to whisper things; reminding you of nearly forgotten gems here, suggesting a promising concept there, or enticing cross-pollination.?

Mind you, for the library to function as a sounding board would require lots of books, grouped by topic or genre, in visible areas of the house. You’re not building a dust-gathering historical archive that sees daylight on occasion. You’re creating, to the extent possible, enclaves for regular library-grazing and introspection. They should reflect and choreograph your preoccupations, the raw ingredients of a disciplinary menu, a learning trajectory—or all of the above. Infuse them with design and intentionality. There has to be some logic behind the content, form, arrangement, location.?

Whatever your choices, consider this: to support disciplined intellectuality and zealous inquiry, a library has to be more than just storage space.

Digital libraries lack the immediacy and palpable constancy to induce ‘on-the-fly cogitation’ of the sort I’m alluding to. They’re an ontological step removed from where impromptu stuff thrives. No screen is as expansive and seamless as a bookcase, no pixelated display is three-dimensional enough to behold from anywhere in a room. Sometimes I pull out six or seven books, set them aside as an aggregate ‘post-it’, go through their highlights and marginal notes for a few days, stare at some others from a distant chair in the interim, consult an old Moleskine, grab another cohort, compose a string of sentences in a document, stare again, repeat. Operate in this methodical, messy, tactile manner for a few years and you’ll find digital repositories profoundly ungratifying.?

The library evolves as you further systematize its uses and the years flow past. Perhaps it proliferates. And don’t worry about space. “Never allow misgivings about ‘space’ to enter your heart,” one of my teachers admonished. “That’s what kitchen cabinets and shelf space in the laundry room are for.”

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Have you ever practiced reading as if it were detective work? Is there a payoff more pleasurable than being dragged down a rabbit hole of forensic activity??

I am not talking about reading a murder mystery (although The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a treat). I am talking about questions—really good, really important ones. The kinds that take months, years, maybe decades to answer. The library is where all the ‘evidence,’ ‘interrogations,’ ‘testimonies,’ and ‘documents’ from various sources are collected, analyzed, labeled, sorted, revisited in light of new findings, and brought together to solve this puzzle or uncover that truth.?

A thinking space like this comes hand-in-glove with detective skills such as patience—along with its corollary willingness to suspend judgment, tolerate ambiguity, and distrust appearances; such as attention to detail with one eye, the greater picture with the other, and the knack for connecting the right dots and ignoring diversions.

Kids ask us really good, really important questions all the time. How we respond can be more decisive than what we say. It’s not a bad idea to involve the library somehow, when appropriate. It gives them a glimpse of the vastness of knowledge; of giants; of worlds waiting to be discovered; of things to look forward to.

They each spotted a flower—yellow daisy and violet. “These, what are they called?” I knew, but we’d like them to learn looking things up. “Remember what they look like, and let’s find out back home.” Hours later, we were home. I’d forgotten the matter completely—my mind was elsewhere. They grabbed their junior encyclopedia; found the section on plants, the flowers, and their answers.

You may need a team—a community of researchers—to crack the big forensic cases. Book clubs and dialogue are great, but they tend to be high-level. I am interested in the minutiae. And there are ways to invite detailed reader perspectives into your library. Have you ever lent someone a book and asked them to jot down their remarks in the text? Many years ago, a teacher borrowed my copy of a logic treatise. I later noticed minor corrections he’d penciled in margins. Minor, but not without consequence on my reading style, lending policy, and purchases. Example? I’ve been paying more for ‘used’ copies covered with marginalia.?

This celebrates an old literary tradition. For centuries, texts circulated with commentary. Marginalia taught readers to peruse manuscripts carefully; progressively enriched the original texts; elicited intergenerational discourses on all manners of thought. What do we lose when we no longer interact with books this way? What could a child gain from exposure to slow study? What would they learn, one day, from parsing the library-workshop that informed their parents’ choices, including their own upbringing?

A purposeful library that supports an ecosystem of inquiry humbles and illuminates, in ways I haven’t even started to describe.