Do you buy books you won't read?
In the wonderful and delicate world of words that have no translation in our language, there is one in Japanese, tsundoku, which portrays a widespread habit: the act of buying a book, not reading it, and leaving it piled up on top of other unread books. The concept refers to the tendency to accumulate books at home that you've only glanced at on the back cover. You've bought some because you came across them gossiping in a bookstore, or because you saw a recommendation in the newspaper, or heard an interview with the author on the radio while you were driving. The copies piled up, one on top of the other, on the nightstand or next to the sofa, don't stop you from continuing to buy more books that you might not read. You never know. Because you always trust that the time will come when you'll be able to.
Of two newly purchased books, maybe one will be a target. tsundokuBecause while you're reading the first one, there will be new titles and discoveries that will pass before the other. The pile of shame They call it in English. The pile of shame. That collection you haven't gotten any use out of. Books you haven't read, or clothes you haven't worn, or video games you haven't played, or craft supplies you haven't even unsealed. And the mountain keeps getting higher. And you don't even dare look through it for fear of feeling bad.
How many times have you resisted entering a bookstore just because you knew it was the only way to avoid a new tsundokuBut you'll always fall again.
The tsundoku It has an aspirational component. Every time you pick up a book, you project your life having read it. You experience the excitement of an everyday life that would allow you to read that book in peace. You're even able to imagine where you'll read it and under what circumstances. You dream of that part of you having read the book, you anticipate its satisfaction, the pleasure of acquiring that knowledge. And this is the greatest temptation there can be.
Umberto Eco, however, had the perfect reasoning to appease the remorse of tsundoku. The thinker and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb explained it in his book The Black SwanEco was a scholar who accumulated more than thirty thousand books in his personal library, differentiating between two types of people: those who conceived of that space as an appendage to stimulate the ego and those who understood it as a site of research. The Italian novelist and semiotician, a bibliophile to the core, believed that unread books were more valuable than read books, that a library should contain what you didn't know because, then, "the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly." The more you read, the more aware you become of the pile of unread books. And inspired by Eco, Taleb called this tsundoku The anti-library. An exciting space of latent knowledge that's always waiting for you.
