The Japanese word refers to buying books and letting them pile up without reading them. At least that’s what Wikipedia says it means, and nobody on the Internet ever lies.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to read and do a lot of it. But my acquisitions are outpacing my completions by a ratio of 10 to 1. Maybe more.
Next to my side of the bed, much to my wife’s consternation, is an ever-growing pile of books. These include the books she and I are reading together, a habit we have cultivated during the pandemic, and the titles I’m tackling solo.
The pile is very egalitarian. F. Scott Fitzgerald is sandwiched between James Patterson and Linda Castillo, writers of more modest literary aspirations. Activist attorney Terry Gilbert’s autobiography, “Trying Times,” is perched atop a Library of America collection of crime novels.
Mixed into the pile are various magazines, dogeared or opened to specific pages. I have about a half-dozen articles in process at any one time, but drift off to sleep before I get to the end of any of them.
Nowadays, my tsundoku pile is almost as large in the digital realm. Comixology — an Amazon company, dontcha know, but these days, what isn’t? — often sells collections of comic books at ridiculously cheap prices, ripe for the downloading. Many times, these are books I read in childhood and then lost or sold, so it’s enticing to revisit them, in bright new colors, complete with issues that I might have missed due to the vagaries of newsstand distribution back in the 1970s and ’80s.
This, on top of articles I find on various newspaper websites — there’s an oxymoron, yes? — that are bookmarked in my phone and on my browser. This is the stuff I peruse in waiting rooms and grocery lines when I’m not subjecting the world to my brilliant opinions, rapier wit and scintillating poetry on Twitter and Facebook.
(It speaks volumes about me that one day last week, when I’d broken into a cold sweat because I’d forgotten to take my wallet to the car dealership to pay for an oil change, I spent my time not solving my dilemma but instead tweeting about it. Luckily, the dealer accepted Apple Pay.)
Every now and then, when the book pile gets too high, both in hard and digital copy, I’ll cull the herd, stacking some books in hidden piles in out-of-the-way corners of the house.
This is, however, a dicey proposition, because as the tectonic book plates shift, new titles rise to the surface, and I end up crawling back to the original bedside pile and adding other books that I’d forgotten about, including some I’ve already read but want to revisit.
Bam! Tsundokued again.
I’m sure a wonderful 12-step program somewhere could cure me of this malady, complete with a bookmobile backing up to my door and little bookworms wriggling in and out, whisking away my titles and leaving only multiple indentations in the carpet to show where the titles have been.
If somebody knows of one, preferably in book form, just send me the name. I’ll get it added to the pile and read posthaste — one of these years.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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