Tsundoku (Japanese)
A few weekends ago, I went to the LA Times Festival of Books. If you’re not familiar, it’s like the Scholastic Book Fair but for adults. And with way longer lines. I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy an armful of new reads. But when I got home and added these new books to my already sizable stack of unread books, I felt a weird sense of shame. Look at all the books I still haven’t read, I thought. Full of stories I still don’t know, information I still haven’t learned, references I still don’t get. And it's not just books. It’s articles, essays, poems —and, ahem, newsletters—that keep piling up on my list of things to read.
This feeling has a name in Japanese: tsundoku. It's a combination of "tsunde," meaning "to stack things," and "oku," meaning "to leave for a while." Tsundoku speaks to our inclination to accumulate things we may not need or have time for, and the guilt that often follows.
Have you ever felt this way? Like there are so many good books to read—so much great art in this world, so much valuable information to consume—that it almost feels disappointing that you won’t be able to get through it all in a lifetime? You might even feel a little ashamed or melancholic about it.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by tsundoku, but there’s another way of looking at it. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to these stacks of unread books as an "antilibrary." He explains:
“You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
Taleb argues that a library of books that have already been read is like having a collection of trophies, a display of what we’ve conquered. And that’s great, but in contrast, an “antilibrary” is a reminder that there's always more to discover. "Read books are far less valuable than unread ones," he argues.
Oddly enough, I never felt tsundoku as a kid leaving a Scholastic Book Fair. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not I’d get through all of my books, I was just excited to find out what was inside of them.
Our new books, with their fresh pages and uncracked spines, can also be a humbling reminder that there’s so much we don’t know, and so much we’ll never know. A single lifetime isn't enough to absorb it all. And maybe that's why we should never stop learning. Or finding joy in buying armfuls of books.
From the archives…
How to Be a Tiny Bit Better at Meditating, Even If You Hate Sitting Still. (The Cut, 2017) “We tend to think of meditation as an exercise in stillness. You climb atop a quiet mountain, cross your legs, breathe in, breathe out. Stay. But what if, hypothetically speaking, you’re terrible at sitting still?”
What’s new?
I worked on: This Hidden Brain episode about why kindness is hard to come by
I read: Mother Tongue: The Story of a Ukrainian Language Convert
Also, why write?
— Kristin
Currently feeling this. I have a couple paperbacks I’ve been meaning to read but never get to so they stand as great decoration and a stack of possibilities. In contrast, my audiobook collection is mostly read. It’s easier for me to read books that way and I don’t get as much guilt about having not read something because it doesn’t take up physical space.
I feel like this all the time. Recently, I’ve been trying out a book buying ban, and it’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes, it helps me look upon my TBR pile with renewed interest, but other times it just makes me mourn all the books I’ve got in my wishlist (sitting at 973 at the moment), none of which I’ll be able to experience until my self imposed ban is over. Worse still, I haven’t set an end date yet. I suppose I should, then it might be easier to bear.