Tsundoku

THERE IS FINALLY A NAME FOR ME!

I must begin with an apology. This post is all about me (and maybe you, if you can relate to the following).

I was sitting at the kitchen table one Saturday morning reading the newspaper when a word jumped straight off the page at me. What was that word, you ask? It was:-

TSUNDOKU!!!!!

It is a Japanese word that roughly translates to mean, “Buying reading material and piling it up”. (BBC, n.d).

Well, this is me to a “T”. I have a huge pile of books on my to-be-read pile.

I don’t stop there, though. I also have a large number of books on my library book shelf. It is one of the up-and-downsides of working in a library. It is tempting when all the new books come in to snaffle a few, on the basis that once they are on the shelves, I will forget their titles.

Next thing you know, I have amassed a sizeable pile on my bookshelf. I take them out with the best of intentions, but I never factor into the equation certain conditions – some books look like quick reads but turn out to take longer than expected, getting side tracked by other books or activities and so on. I blink and three weeks have passed and the books are due – thank goodness for renewals. However, the books still just sit there, staring at me accusingly from the shelf. In the end I just bring them back – unread.

What is your reading quirk? Do you like to read your through the alphabet? Are you a ‘grab any random book from the shelves’ type book chooser? Do you only read the same genre? What is your reading quirk?

Also, don’t you just love finding a word in another language that describes a concept or a feeling that is hard to translate easily into English? Schadenfreude, anyone???

Acknowledgements:

BBC (n.d). Tsundoku: the art of buying books and never reading them.

BBC.com/news/world_44981013