Everyone who knows me, knows that I buy books.
Many people do, but I buy a little bit more. A teeny weeny bit more – ok, actually a lot more. Usual book purchase trips involve me walking out with shopping trolleys filled with the stuff.
The most obvious question that I get asked is – so when will you finish reading them??
Hmm..maybe the point of buying them is not to read them all.
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 30,000 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 allow 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 anti-library.
So yes, I am building an anti-library.
There is an actual word for this affliction of mine – TSUNDOKU. Japanese for the tendency to buy books and let them pile up around the house unread. Tsundoku dates from the Meiji era, and derives from a combination of tsunde-oku (to let things pile up) and dokusho (to read books). It can also refer to the stacks themselves. Crucially, it doesn’t carry a pejorative connotation, being more akin to bookworm than irredeemable slob.
So yes, it doesn’t matter if you don’t get a chance to read them all. Maybe someone else will, maybe not. But the joy of discovering is something you cannot put a price on – a chapter here, a series of images there, a passage from a oft-read book, a short story…the gift that does not exhaust itself.
Let’s Tsundoku!
