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What's in your Tsundoku?
Purple Fairy Tree
Posts: 2,054
Tsundoku, the Japanese word defined as the habit of collecting stacks of books that you haven't read and might never get to
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Prof Andrew Gerstle teaches pre-modern Japanese texts at the University of London.
The word "doku" can be used as a verb to mean "reading". According to Prof Gerstle, the "tsun" in "tsundoku" originates in "tsumu" - a word meaning "to pile up".
So when put together, "tsundoku" has the meaning of buying reading material and piling it up.
"The phrase 'tsundoku sensei' appears in text from 1879 according to the writer Mori Senzo," Prof Gerstle explained. "Which is likely to be satirical, about a teacher who has lots of books but doesn't read them."
While this might sound like tsundoku is being used as an insult, Prof Gerstle said the word does not carry any stigma in Japan.
Source: BBC News
*The Sleep Book is targeted at insomniacs, so very difficult to pick up and read at night if you don't have problems with getting to sleep!
About 50 books. I keep adding to it ....just got another 5 books in the past week.
With the pandemic, my local library has been closed and is still closed. You can request books online and pick them up but even that schedule is not convenient for me. At work we have various books on a shelf and I have read all that interested me. After I lost that option, I heard an interview on the radio with John Douglas, former FBI agent responsible for developing the Behavioral Science Unit - profiling criminals. So then I ordered a few of his books. Fascinating reading but quite disturbing at the same time. So after two I was done with those.
Then I ordered a few books on line that once I started reading realized I had read them before. But I read them again because it had been a while and I'm not opposed to reading a book multiple times.
So recently I went in a whole different direction, I decided to order a few books written by women I admire. So I don't have a Tsundoku so to speak since I read what I buy/borrow . . . and then donate. But this is what I have up next . . .
The thing with donating books is I did that and ended buying them again. I might donate some books from my tsundoku.
But I‘ll catch up eventually, hopefully. Next on my Tsundoku list is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Then I can finally watch the Amazon series as well. Then Dune before the new movie comes out
Have been thinking on going back through the Dune books again.
(This is one of the reasons why the pile is so large....I re-read other books or read one in a series and buy/read other books in the series.)
Did go back and reread the first one somewhere along the line, as well.
even if I look and act really crazy.
and