The Nowbrary: A Living Constellation of Books

January 21, 2025•1,353 words

For the visually inclined, a concept page.

I've been thinking about the strange magic of books - not the ones lined up on our shelves or listed in our reading apps, but the ones that are alive in our minds, the ones leaving traces in our margins and echoes in our conversations.

We've gotten very good at tracking the books we've read and listing the books we want to read, but somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the books that are actively shaping our thinking. Goodreads turns reading into a performance sport, complete with yearly challenges and status updates. Even Calibre, for all its useful organization, treats books as artifacts to be cataloged rather than ideas in motion.

What I wanted was something different - I found that as I went for walks in my neighborhood, with the luxurious real estate a baby stroller provides, I would browse the little free libraries and actively curate my collection, pruning what's remained in my home for too long, unread and collecting dust, or my simply having outgrown it, and it the space on my Ikea Kallax. That's when the idea of a nowbrary emerged, inspired by Derek Sivers' /now page movement, which showed us how powerful it can be to simply share what has our attention right now.

A nowbrary isn't a reading list or a book diary - it's a living constellation of the works that are actively participating in your intellectual life. Like the seasons themselves, it moves in natural cycles. Some books are spring thoughts, planting new seeds in your mind. Others are summer companions, helping you grow and expand. Some are autumn harvests, helping you integrate what you've learned. And some are winter reflections, deepening your understanding through quiet contemplation. If the seasons and their bounty got you hungry, then think of it as a forced exercise in cleaning up your bookshelves.

It initially started as a way for me to stop feeling guilty about collecting books, at some point I shifted from collecting physical books to a ballooning 2500+ digital library. But my moment of clarity came when I would reach for the same few books to put in my bag for any amount of travel on public transportation that took more than an hour and a half, or a vacation that lasted longer than 3 days. They were the books I'd love to reread and recall, as if everytime I returned I'd get a new way of understanding the same words.

I noticed it again during the endless video calls of recent years - that moment when someone's talking and your eyes drift to their bookshelf, trying to make out titles in the background. My own backdrop started as happenstance - whatever books fit the shelf behind my desk. But as I found myself increasingly aware of which books were visible during calls, it became another way to think about my nowbrary. Not as performance, but as presence. These aren't books positioned to impress; they're the ones actively shaping my thinking, the ones I reach for during conversations.

And so the rules emerged organically, each one reflecting something essential about how we really engage with books:

Active Resonance: Only books you're actively engaging with - either through recent deep reading or ongoing reflection. These aren't just books you've read, but books that are reading you back.
Natural Limits: Keep to what you can meaningfully hold in your mind's eye (42 books maximum, or what a 2x4 Kallax can fit). Enough to create rich connections, few enough to maintain genuine engagement.
Three Pillars: Include foundation stones (books that ground you), current catalysts (books actively changing your thinking), and horizon markers (books pushing your boundaries). This creates a dynamic balance between stability and growth.
Temporal Span: Include works from at least three centuries. Let old wisdom speak to new questions, and new insights illuminate ancient truths.
Challenge Point: At least one book should actively challenge your current beliefs or assumptions. Growth happens at the edges of comfort.

These categories aren't walls - they're windows. Foundation stones aren't just your favorite books; they're the ones that have become part of how you think. You return to them not to remember what they said, but to discover what they're saying now. Current catalysts are the books actively changing how you see things, the ones that make you put them down and stare into space for a while, processing. Horizon markers show you possible futures or alternative presents - they're not necessarily about the future, but they expand what you think is possible.

A little like life, the nowbrary moves in rhythms. Not the artificial markers of reading challenges or yearly goals I'll give up on in a few weeks, but deeper shifts in how we're oriented to ideas, what questions we're sitting with, what conversations we need most. Some books remain constant companions while others naturally shift in and out of focus as our intellectual seasons change.

I've noticed some natural tendencies that can pull a nowbrary away from its purpose. It's tempting to treat it as a best-of collection, but your nowbrary isn't about showing off your taste or knowledge. Some of your favorite books might not belong there right now - they're not currently in conversation with your thinking. It's also easy to make it aspirational, filling it with important books you should read, plan to read, or wish you had read. But that's a different list. Your nowbrary is about what's alive in your mind right now, not what you hope will be.

Starting your own nowbrary begins with what's already there. Clear a shelf - any shelf. Walk through your home collecting books that you've quoted recently, keep within arm's reach, have reread in the past year, find yourself recommending, are actively wrestling with. Place these books on your shelf. Don't organize them yet. Just gather them. Sit with this collection for a day. Notice which books naturally group together, which ones feel essential, which ones don't quite belong yet, where the gaps are.

Right now, Hofstadter's "Grammar of Systems" is teaching me to see systems dancing in everything, Acemoglu's "Power and Progress" is making me question every story we tell about progress in this A.I. blinded world, and Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" is showing me how many futures we've already imagined and how many stories we continue to perpetuate. Each one of these changes how I read the others.

Tomorrow's constellation might look different. That's exactly the point.

Like the /now page movement that inspired it, a nowbrary creates a meaningful signal among the noise. Not another feed to scroll through or achievement list to maintain, but a snapshot of what's actually resonating in this moment. It becomes a way to find others thinking about similar questions, wrestling with similar ideas, exploring similar territories.

When someone asks what you're reading, your nowbrary gives you something more interesting to share than a current book title. Instead of "I'm reading X," you can talk about how patterns from one book are showing up in another, or how an old foundation stone suddenly speaks to a current question.

The digital version can be as simple as a page on your website - no social features, no gamification, just your current intellectual companions and how they're shaping your thinking. But the real power isn't in the website or the format - it's in the reflection it invites, the connections it reveals, the conversations it makes possible.

We've built plenty of tools for managing our relationship with books. Maybe what we need now is a way for recognizing how books are actively shaping us - not every book we've read, not every book we'll read, but the ones that are alive in our minds right now.

That's what a nowbrary is for.

Your nowbrary is an invitation to deeper conversations about the books that are breathing life into our thinking.

/Nowbrary