Posted on
by

A six minute ramble:

Sometimes, you don’t know how the platform works. You’ve skipped the tutorial. Except there was no tutorial, no rulebook, so you kinda have to play it by ear.

Until very recently, that was my experience with Bookwyrm. It’s a Goodreads alternative that connects to the Fediverse:

https://bookwyrm.social

Every day, when I get up, there’s a three-way choice I’ve got to make between reading, writing, and gaming. I can try to do them all, but usually, Time won’t let me:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/27/death-and-work/

Platforms like Bookwyrm (or Goodreads) offer a solution to those in my position. Besides being spaces where you can leave reviews on books for others to find, you can offload all those books you want to read onto digital lists – a ‘backlog,’ in my vocabulary:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/backlog#Noun

This is where the problems begin. I thought 2024 would be my year for reading and reviewing books, since my Backlog of ’23 became prolific:

https://brologue.net/tag/books-of-2023

It turns out that the same entity that disciplines me into clarifying my notes does not have the same effect on reading. I mean you. Yes, YOU: the nebulous, quantum panopticon, all-seeing and unseeing collection of eyeballs known as The Audience.

I’d add books I wanted to read (or were currently reading) to my lists, thinking that, at some point, I’d write a review. I also make records of how much dust I have to hoover and never get round to the hoovering. Point is, as far as reading’s concerned, backlogs seem to be the managerial solution. That is, you make a note of something, and wait for the proverbial toadie to come and do the dirty work. After all, the last thing a manager wants to do is physically manage people.

Occasionally, I imagine The Audience beating me with a keisaku stick, telling me to get back to work. Delusional, I know. And it’s not really doing anything for me. I felt the need to tell you ahead of time what I was reading, like that would motivate me to finish the book; like I NEEDED motivation.

In truth, I don’t, and I thought it was a lesson I should’ve learned ages ago. I can’t promise a review of anything I haven’t fully read. There’s no point in telling you what I’m currently reading, and the lists of books I’ve yet to read staring back at me doesn’t make it any easier.

So, in trying to think through how I’d like to change my use of Bookwyrm, two ideas came to mind that appeared interesting to explore:

  1. Backlogs have a touch of the eerie about them;
  2. Backlogs are not antilibraries.

I’ll go through the second one first – though, I do warn you, what I’m going to talk about might just be a massive load of shite.

Backlogs are Not Antilibraries (permalink)

A few weeks ago, I was reading the latest blogpost from Nikhil Suresh, “Get Weird and Disappear” – in which, he writes a footnote about Nassim Taleb’s theory of the antilibrary:

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-weird-and-disappear/#fnref:1

an antilibrary is there to educate and humble […] If you were to point out that the optimal antilibrary strategy is to constantly buy books and never read any, Taleb (and I) would call you a nerd.

First and foremost, for writers, their libraries are a tool, and within every library is its antilibrary – the books they haven’t read. A book on a shelf in an antilibrary does not contain nor reflect the owner’s desire to read it. You can’t say the same for a backlog – they appear, at least to me, as an ‘ego-boosting appendage,’ as Taleb writes:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

So, whenever I’m not consuming that thing, I feel like I’m in what Oliver Burkeman calls ‘productivity debt,’ i.e., focusing on the things I’ve yet to complete. That’s what treating Bookwyrm as a backlog does, I think. Better to treat the platform as a tally of finished books. That way, I focus solely on what I’ve read, rather than what I’ve still to complete; the books stay in the physical world, and I only ever bring their existence into cyberspace when I’ve finished reading them.

Backlogs are Eerie (permalink)

Backlogs are an anxiety-inducing presence when there should be nothing. And that, folks, fits the definition of what Mark Fisher defined as the eerie in his 2017 book, The Weird and the Eerie:

https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-weird-and-the-eerie

Ever-increasing in size, our backlogs are filled with books we intend to read at some point. We give those books intentionality, as in, just through our intentions alone, they have a sort of agency:

Intentionality includes intent as we ordinarily understand it, but really refers to the capacity to feel a certain way ABOUT things. Rivers may possess agency – they affect changes – but they do not care about what they do; they do not have any sort of attitude towards the world.

Backlogs intend, but the agent who does the intending is always absent after a backlog’s creation1. Antilibraries don’t really intend – they’re tools, after all. A hammer doesn’t reflect back a desire to chase up nails to hammer, and judges you for not using it.

I’ve made an effort to articulate all this, but I doubt myself. Which is why I took to Bluesky and Mastodon under a couple of hashtags to ask: “Is your Goodreads a backlog, or a tally? If the former, do you feel its PRESENCE brings you more anxiety than a bookshelf?”

https://mendeddrum.org/@brologue/114624982256648121

https://bsky.app/profile/brologue.net/post/3lqrrb7szos23

I should’ve mentioned antilibraries at some point, but didn’t. My respondents aren’t as bothered about their backlog’s presence. StoryGraph is a Thing That Exists, I guess. One person put forward a good point:

We immediately perceive up to seven things but after that we have [to] count them. But digitally you usually have the numbers readily available.

Or, as neuroscientists argue, we hold between four to seven items in short-term memory. The driving difference between physical and digital backlogs is not about the space or the aesthetics. It’s about information, I think.

The difference is, one gives me immediate feedback and metadata about those books, that I didn’t ask for, and the other, I squint at. Libraries are for squinting, and thinking, ‘maybe there’s thirty books – and, oooh, I haven’t picked you up in a while.’ If I’m feeling anal, I could spend ten minutes counting up all the books.

My library, and its antilibrary, one physical unit of information, is easier on the brain, because I’m not thinking about any book (or books) in particular. A backlog, on the other hand, is always concerned about certain books.

This post has been a tangled web of thoughts, and all they amount to is this: instrumentalising reading sucks. I think I’ll jive with Bookwyrm more by using it as a tally from now on.

  1. That agent being us. And we’ll deny it for the longest time. I think that’s what we in the trade call ‘procrastination.’ I’m not 100% sure on that, but I’ll get around to asking at some point. ↩︎

TTLY… (permalink)

CC

“I Don’t Like Backlogs, Actually” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. So long as you clearly credit me, this blog, and provide a clear URL for people to follow, you may use this work as you like.