The Pleasures of Tsundoku: How I learned to stop worrying and love book piles

I buy around 3 times as many books as I finish (although I do finish many books). There is a special pleasure in browsing second hand book shops and pick up stuff you like the idea of reading.

It also used to give me tremendous pleasure giving a friend, a colleague or even a random encounter a book I myself had enjoyed at some point, although after the emergence of kindles, that became less and less appreciated (although some will still accept recommendations).

I pile up books on my desk, on shelves, next to my bed, and it gives me pleasure just looking at them. I hate accumulating physical possesions except books.

I look at my shelf (and my desk, and next to my bed) and it's a monument to things I have had fleeting interests in and things that are life long passions, stories that sits so deep inside me that they have come to define part of who I am, but of course also stories that were mere dreams and left no mark (although I have another pile in a corner for those books that I intend to get rid of... One day).

I love books, it has been the one constant in my life since I was very young child.

There's also a nice concept called an antilibrary [1]:

> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. 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.

At least, it's a good excuse to buy more books that one can read. :)

[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...

We lived in New Delhi for a year in the late 70s. One of my favorite memories was a weekly trip to Faqir Chand and Sons, a bookstore. I have strong memories of walking through the stacks of books, seemingly random, and with no shelves.

It’s a very different feeling from something as organized as a library, or Powell’s here in Portland. You never knew what you’d find next, on what topic, or in what condition. It was endless exploration, pure delight.

Faqir Chand is still in business. They don’t have a website, but the photos on their Twitter look just as I remember: https://twitter.com/faqirchandbooks

After about the 20th time in my life I moved heavy boxes of books from one apartment to another, I gave up on books as physical objects.

These days, I keep only the few books that are better served in print form (e.g. references, cookbooks, art anthologies), or that are rare/out of print. Everything else I get rid of immediately after reading, or read only a Kindle. It's very similar to my philosophy for furniture: I refuse to possess an object if I am not going to use it and/or draw direct pleasure from that specific object on a regular basis. Individual books rarely make the cut.

For 95% of the stuff I read (novels, pop non-fiction, etc.), I never even buy a physical copy of a book. Books have a huge parasitic cost. I'd rather have a clean living space and easy moves. For me, the mental benefit of just not seeing clutter is hugely beneficial.

I wish this piece had moved beyond finding out about a new word and what it means. It felt like it could have been the introduction to a longer piece about actually learning to stop worrying about unread books, but instead the author seems to have trailed off in a mirror to the books the piece focuses on.

Is the discovery that other people have a word for the accumulation of unread books really enough to make the attached anxiety melt away?

I'm the grandchild of librarians on both sides, and I've had the urge to archive and catalogue and preserve and retain for my whole life. It's crippling. There's a perverse illusion buried in the need to collect and archive books and possessions. I wish the author could have done more than scratch the surface for me!

I thought I felt this way about a lot of stuff I never used or looked at. Then I read the Marie Kondo book and tried it and I realized it was much more freeing to have the space and only have the books, movies, games, etc. that I actually cared about, not have them mixed with tons I was indifferent to.

Life-affirming, but a little discouraging to those of us who are seeking to rebuild our hypertext-attenuated attention spans in favor of the printed word. Acceptance helps, but how does one truly master the ability to read books again?

I think one thing is to consider what alternate activity one is engaging in as procrastination away from reading. And hypertext whether long-form essay, news article, social media post, comment thread, let alone video media, is such an effective consumer of attention.

Books on the floor is a great aesthetic. You can see it in the video game Deus Ex Human Revolution. Being surrounded by books that you may or may not have read, but you aspire to read, makes you feel like you'll never truly be bored.

I've recently started worrying about a pile of books, but for an unrelated reason: they don't hold up well. Stacked on top of each other, the books above crush the spines of the books below. And more disturbingly, they get covered in dust and, if the humidity is high enough, mold. Then they attract a small bug called book lice. They're reportedly harmless to humans, but it's awful to see something crawling across the pages of my textbooks.

My house is not a dump, but it's ground level and not temperature controlled. Somehow, the little critters reached my books stacked high on a ledge in the far corner of my room.

As soon as lumber prices go down, my plan is to build a sealed bookshelf and line it with silica packets. I'll have to toss my books into ziplocs and freeze them before loading the shelves. What a mess.

I recently just used LibraryThing to catalog all of my books. The UPC camera/scanner was nice although I had to laugh when I saw a picture of a cue cat on the site! I’ve got all of my ebooks and audiobooks catalogued as well. Turns out I loved some books so much I bought them in 2 forms. Oops.

I still have a proverbial shape shifting Jenga at my place, not just books but research papers too. Although things are a bit saner once I got a tablet. I do appreciate the advantages that a tablet brings, but I do have to be more careful with it than I am with a book.

One of the not quite unexpected but very obvious benefits of having paper books around (although mostly properly presented on shelves thank you) is that a child born into such a household grows up seeing books and his parents handling and reading them. Our 2½ year old now has lots of books of his own (like most of his peers of course), but he's also acutely aware that books (and by extension pure, focused, uninterrupted reading) are a natural part of his parents lives as well.

I enjoy buying and having books around. I must be honest that it stresses me out at times regarding how much I haven't read, but then I try to relax myself by thinking of the possibilities that lie ahead. Most of my books are nonfiction, and so often times it's nice to just crack one open and read short bits of it.

I also greatly enjoy the selection and curation processes.

The article is very light on details. I would have liked to have more information than just learning a new word.

That being said, I think it is valuable to be aware of why I don't read my books.

Currently, I am sometimes reading Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation". Despite being a good book that has definitely helped me understand a novel viewpoint on postmodern society, it is written so dense that I can read no more than one of its essays per week.

Then there is "The five invitations". This book is about death and dying and how we can live so we do not regret anything at our deathbed. Reading it sometimes makes me uncomfortable. I do not want to be confronted with death. But then again, I am not the one to decide when I have to face death. Again, this leads to putting the book back in the shelf and reading it only sporadically.

And then there are a bunch of books which i stopped reading when I thought I got the gist of it or which were just not relevant to me anymore.

Strange behavior. To me at least. I very rarely buy and its only if I feel I want manually skip through the pages and draw inspiration. Otherwise it's always an audiobook.

The physical act itself of hunkering down with my head pointed downwards is just so unappealing doing more than enough of that with programming. Being able to take a walk and enjoy the outsides while listening (or in general filling the empty slots when i have to take a bus, go to the store etc) is just so liberating it has become an integral part of my life.

Those in HN that have a large library, how do you maintain a catalog of your books? Do you keep a list of to-buy and to-sell/give?

Also, dust covers on hardbacks, do you toss them or keep them?

Gives hope. Though, I do wonder if there is a timeout. Is a decade, or two, enough to conclude that you are not going to finish it and move it to an archive lot? And, when is it OK to decide that you are never going to get to some books and pass them along to those who might? Questions which don't keep me up at night, but moments like this bring them surging to the fore.

I will buy a paper copy of any books which I like and continue to read or use as reference. But until they have earned that status then it’s Kindle and PDF I’m afraid. Books have a storage burden which is not to be underestimated.

My current list of keepers is only three titles as a starting point and two are technical books.

I have lately started separating books into two categories: precious ones that I want to preserve, and others. All books are not equal; and the care (storage, protection from dust/humidity etc.) varies accordingly.

Tsundoku, a favorite addition to my vocabulary. I learned it here on HN sometime in the past two years or so. I identify strongly with the meaning of the word as did my father although I doubt he ever knew the word.

I've got a lot of book piles right now as I don't have enough shelves. I'd much rather have shelves.

つんつん積読よりズンズンズンドコ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQvoZLjfus