Tsundoku
About that pile of books by your bed
Got a pile of books by the bed? Stack of unreads staring at you from the shelves? Perhaps even some small stacks on the stairs? This is one of my favourite “when there’s a word for something very specific” cases: tsundoku
It’s also the subject of shorter than usual podcast episode:
👉 Listen on Spotify · Apple · YouTube
The tsundoku sketch had easy inspiration from my parents, who are both incredible readers and world-class tsundokists. At one point, we had small piles of books on many of the steps of the stairs. And the bedroom pictured was loosely modelled on memories of their bedroom growing up. It made it into the praise for Big Ideas Little Pictures.
I’ve found that I’ve nurtured the habit pretty well. These days, I buy books to read the original sources for sketches—often something I’ve heard but am not 100% sure of until I see it written in the original form—and that gets me through a fair few.
When I did my PhD, I was basically a professional reader. I learned from a friend how to go back and back, following a chain of thought to the original source. He would often end up reading books from 50 to 100 years ago to find the genesis of an idea.
It’s so easy on the internet these days to do a search—or ask AI—and accept the response as given. But it means weak attribution proliferates and promotes surface-level research. Randall Munroe, of course, has a great drawing on this:
It’s very satisfying to read the original source in a book. The flimsiness of web citations has made me appreciate the joy of a good textbook all the more.
You can think of tsundoku like this from the brilliant Ellis Rosen:
But you can also think of the books you’ve bought as a wine cellar:
Think not of the books you’ve bought as a “to be read” pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.
I ascribe to Ramit Sethi’s book-buying rule: “If you’re even considering buying a book, JUST BUY IT.” If you get even one decent idea from it, it’s a bargain.
Big Ideas Little Pictures also has this sketch, which is a basic calculation my dad shared with me. I find this sometimes elicits strong reactions from people. Someone once shared it on a Facebook group about books and it had perhaps the most reactions of any of my sketches:
To be honest, as we discuss in the episode, I find tsundoku rather aspirational. A desire to learn and read, backed up by your wallet, and you either have more than you can manage or you’re too busy doing other non-book things to get through them all. Good for you.
In the podcast, I mention Tom Gauld, who does some brilliant cartoons about books.
We ended the episode with this beautiful passage from Carl Sagan (via Austin Kleon):
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.
But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.
Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.
Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”—Carl Sagan, “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” - Episode 11: “The Persistence of Memory” (YouTube clip) via Austin Kleon
Do you tsundoku? Or do you tsundon’t?
(and do check out the podcast: 👉 Listen on Spotify · Apple · YouTube)
I loved this and found it very relatable!
Especially the 3.500 lifetime reads sketch! haha, as you say "A lot of books. And also not a lot of books."
One night I finished reading a book and went to sleep. The next day I thought "where am I going today?" and laughed. I went from a mystery in India to a boy learning forest management in Japan.