Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them | Hacker News Reader

Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them

bbc.co.uk

140 pointslnguyen65 comments

I have about 500 physical books right now ranging from learning Chinese to advanced c++ to quantitative finance to Seeet Chi.

My wife hates it. I buy books because I want to. I hope to read them. Someday I will, I know this. I read a lot already but the implementing what I have read and practicing takes time away from reading new subject matter. Example learning Chinese..it’s been 3 years and I still practice daily. Quant stuff.. I’ve been implementing and refining my code but this all takes time away from th piles of books I have accumulated.

Is your rate of accumulating books higher than your rate of reading them?

I thought that was the normal way of life for anyone who buys books. It is for me....

I wouldn't say so. I have a queue of books I want to read, but the ones I actually acquire are just a small subset of that.

And very reasonably so. What you want, right, is a two-tier system: a kind of limbo state for the partially-read, a liberal scattering of them about the house, where they will healthily compete for your time - some will prove themselves under these conditions, others will recede into a shameful cupboard or the basement or wherever - and then a glamorous on-display shelf where your approved, appreciated selection sits, guilt-free and proud, having floated upwards due to their superior quality.

If the book churn is too low, any old rubbish makes it to the top.

For the last 5 years, yes. I accumulate faster than reading. At other times in life I read a book before accumulating another one.

Are you learning new ways to implement existing strategies or learning new strategies to implement?

Both, topic depending.

I can’t edit my original comment now but some things are weird.

For example: I have 4 books about Gordon Ramsay. I have maybe 80 Chinese books. I have 60-70 c++ books. Maybe 40 books on game design. Many books about Apple and related dating back from the early 90’s. I have a set of weird books that are dated 1810. The English is old and hard to understand but one of them discusses Puritan religion and beliefs. So many topics...

Ive bought 30 computer books. I have never read a single one. Yet I now know the materials reasonably well, though admittedly nowhere near as well as I would had I actually opened their covers.

I still keep buying them too... because I feel this time it would be different. And of course it never is. Am I the only one who does this?

I do currently but more books than I can read because I implement what I read or try to.

Maybe try and find free books online?

Last month I finished reading Truth and Method, a book purchased from somebody moving out of town about 1981. Last fall I finished reading The World as Will and Imagination, which was part of the same purchase.

Those are outliers for my advance purchases. Truth be told, though, lack of shelf space does a lot for my self-discipline.

I ran out of shelf space a long time ago. I have stacks of books in a room plus boxes in storage.

How about having too many tabs that you never get around to closing?

Articles on Instapaper and the like that you never get around to reading?

Side projects that you never finish?

I would definitely add Steam games that are never played.

Or just games in general (glancing at my collection of >1000 titles).

I went into Steam and just decided to hide a bunch of those games. Most of them I got through Humble Bundle. A lot of chaff.

I've been wanting to make a todo list that is sensitive to this. It's called Promises, and, when you add a todo item, you make a "promise" to resolve it. Every day the promise is active, it gets a bit more grey, and after a month it eventually fades away and gets added to a section of the app called "the hell of broken promises", where it can never be removed from again. If you do resolve it, it gets fulfilled and goes away with a nice animation.

Hopefully, this will force you to consider what you actually intend to finish versus what you're just adding for the feel-good factor of "oh yeah, I'm definitely going to do this at SOME point, years later". I don't know whether that's good or not, but it'll be a fun project, and I think we'd all be better off if we could say "you know, if I haven't read that news article in the two months since I've added it, it's probably not important enough to keep around".

I think this would be a truly powerful tool if the promises were only able to be removed/declared complete by someone else, who would partner with you as a kind of integrity escrow agent. You keep my future self honest to my present self, I do the same for you. Then generalize to groups with a big graph of stake holder crosslinks if you want to get enterprise-ey with it.

I've found that this is kind of a brain-hack. Adding the article to Instapaper or opening the tab itself satisfies my FOMO even if I don't actually read it or only glance at it later before closing or marking as read. I do a similar thing for side-projects - I have a Google Doc where I keep a list of side projects. When a new one comes up or when I find myself fixated on ideas for an existing one I just write the ideas down in the doc, likely to never be read again. Writing them down seems to get them out of my head.

> How about having too many tabs that you never get around to closing?

Sounds like me, and inevitably when I feel the need to declutter, I go through them and add them to my bookmark folders - never to be opened again.. but maybe one day

Or my browser will crash on me, and the "restore previous session" will be broken/lost and so will the cache of the previous previous session and the information will be lost forever - although that's payback for keeping up all those tabs for weeks on end (maybe longer)

I had like +2000 tabs saved in my OneTab now, plus hundred of tab groups in Session Tab (not on my PC, so not sure about correct name) plus +200 tabs saved in Pinboard. I tend to collect things and made myself actually have to look over at least once to see if it worth saving...

> 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.

Nassim Taleb in "The Black Swan" on the value of unread books.

The questions remains, probably, what it means for a book to be 'read'. I'd posit that that books are only valuable in your possession if you know it - this specific book - exists, maybe even where exactly in your house if you have a lot, and you have a basic idea of the contents. So you have to open them at least once and get a general overview of the index, maybe the illustrations, maybe even a bit more. Is this book still unread? I'd say truly unread books are worthless without a search function, which is not yet well implemented in the physical world.

Any suggestions for solving or improving on this?

I used to have a humble bundle subscription and every month I got like 5 games on Steam, and played around 2 per year. My solution for this one was to unsubscribe. Yes, I still see it every now and then and think "Oh would be cool to play this" but then I remind myself that I would have no time for it.

Another case is started projects or just ideas that never get realized. But no solution for this. I know I should "just start" and finish small increments etc, but it doesn't seem to be enough to motivate me, even though I think my ideas would make for some great useful apps/scripts.

What suggestions does HN have?

Is it really a problem to be solved? As the article mentions, there's no negative association with the word tsundoku in Japan. It seems like having a reserve of reading material is a good thing; you'll always have something new to read and learn when you * do * have unexpectedly free time. The material will be pre-filtered to subjects you care about and it will be close at hand, minimizing the friction of using those random gaps.

I guess one downside is queue prioritization and management, but maybe the piling gives you an opportunity to test the strength of your interest in a subject relative to other items in your queue.

Well, some of us see an early sign of hoarding in people who stockpile books.

Even if someone has the means to grow a large library without interfering in their day to day living, I think there is something sad about large, private libraries and collections where books sit untouched. I compare them to books in a bustling university or community library and think what a shame it is for those resources to waste away like that.

My wife and I still haul around some books we acquired during university, which feel like equal part sentimentality and obligation. But, we've re-taken to using our nearby libraries to borrow books, read them, and return them to the stream.

When I buy books these days, I read them and then usually set them free somewhere, whether a miniature lend-borrow shelf at work or just loaning them out to anybody I know who might be interested. I don't loan them with an expectation to see them again, but the hope they will get passed along and well used.

For videogames:

1. Blanket ban on anything "unreleased" - alpha, beta, early access, pre-order etc.

2. Stop buying bundles and packs.

3. Stop buying "good old games". Yes, I get it, there are approximately a thousand more incredible classic games that I really need to play, but unfortunately I don't have much time for that. Or limit classics to 1 per year.

For books:

1. Stop buying anything in bad editions - paperbacks, paper similar to toilet paper etc.

2. Stop buying "one off" books, e.g. big series of fiction, detectives or whatever.

3. Limit yourself to very good or rare editions, books where illustrations matter etc.

I have same issues, books simply don't fit on the shelves, even in two rows, Steam library backlog is way too big and I still tend to buy stuff on impulse, but more restrained now due to above rules.

For games I just stopped buying anything that I didn't intend to play instantly.

And I do mean instantly. As soon as I get it, I start playing.

If I don't plan to do that, I don't buy the game until I do.

I now ignore sales completely, and only buy games when I want to play them.

This, surprisingly, actually lowered my game expenditure. But I was getting into the low 200s in my steam library, and I think I have only run around 30 of those at least once, so it was all really wasteful.

I roughly adapted the same thing to books, I don't buy a new book until I'm done reading my current book, or decided to drop the book I'm reading.

EDIT: Let me be clear: While I say instantly there's some flexibility. I may order a game on Amazon Wednesday, get it on Thursday, and start playing on the weekend. I think instantly may have been the wrong word. More like immediate/nearest in time.

This is my exact policy as well, for steam games and also now board games which are wildly harder to play (logistically)

After the recent steam summer sale where I bought nothing I felt like I had been handed the one ring and passed the test

I'm reading mostly on Kindle. So when I'm interested in a book, I don't buy it right away, I "send a free sample" to my Kindle. This way I at least save money. And the pile of samples in my Kindle serves as a to-read list. I only buy a book I fully read the sample and still want to read it.

One of the downsides of piling unread books for me is that later when I return to a book I feel like it's "old news". I have better chances to read a book when I first encounter it.

Similar to that, I had a bad habit of buying whole series at a time, before the kindle era, because you never knew once a series would grip you how fast you'd want to read it all quickly or vice versa where you might want days/months between volumes to palate cleanse. The kindle makes it so easy now at the end of a book to buy the next book in the series that I try to only buy one book at a time in a series, only buying the next when I'm ready to start it.

I'm into physical books and as a result of that I have a rather large bookcase in my living room. The books are sort of ordered by type (literature, foreign literature, non-fiction, etc), with some space in between. 'Unread books' is a separate type.

Whenever I feel the urge to buy something new, I check the physical space the unread books take up on the shelf. If they extend beyond a totally arbitrary limit that I set for myself, then I have to wait and read some of them first. Works very well for me.

I would like to hear suggestions as well. Most projects start off with a core idea I think everyone will love but when I start implementing I get the feeling that no one will use/see this and lose interest. The only projects I finish are for myself.

I've also been guilty of this. For programming side projects, I recently decided I was going to think of them as microservices. I've been guilty of overengineering what should have been something simple and losing interest halfway through.

Instead of a polished, user-friendly product, I'm building simple utilities (CLI or minimal UI) that can be leveraged (or refactored) into something else in the future. Good documentation also helps!

> then I remind myself that I would have no time for it

The best (worst) is when you actually have time, but instead of playing all this stuff from humble bundles and sales, you just keep playing Overwatch…

> The best (worst) is when you actually have time, but instead of playing all this stuff from humble bundles and sales, you just keep playing Overwatch…

Or like me where your backlog is so big that when you have time and motivation to play games you lose that motivation as you go through your library trying to decide what to actually play.

Toudoku (盗読): the habit of reading free scans of expensive books you never intend to buy.

Caution: just made that word up; don't spring it cold turkey on your Japanese friends.

I like this. It's something I enagage in occasionally.

I buy lots of books, sometimes expensive books, but every now and then I find some $300+ industry handbook that covers my hobby interests and that I would really love to skim through... LibGen comes to the rescue then.

Sadly, I also engage in bookmarkdoku and browsertabdoku

I think you meant tsunbookmark and tsunbrowsertab :-)

(tsun = piling up, doku = reading, according to the article)

doku means POISON. in this case, "addiciton"

sudoku = addicted to numbers (the game)

so bookmarkdoku and etc would be correct ... addicted to bookmarking...

While you are right that 毒 (doku) means 'poison', the Japanese word for 'sudoku' is 数独[1].

数 (su) = number, numeral, digit

独 (doku) = alone, solitary, single

This conveys the idea that the digits may only appear once per {row, column, box}.

[1]: https://jisho.org/search/sudoku

"doku" (読) in "tsundoku" means "reading". There are several kanji that can be read as "doku". Also I think 中 (chū) from 中毒 (chūdoku, addiction) is used as a suffix for addiction, for example アル中 (aruchū) - alcohol addiction.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of dullness, I shall fear no boredom, for my books are with me. My piles of books, they comfort me. I prepared a bookshelf in the presence of tedium. I anointed my PS4 with purchases on sale, my backlogs runneth over.

> my PS4

That was going nicely, you had to go and spoil it ...

("Die, heretic!")

Books, audiobooks, games, music, good food, time with friends and family, time spent in nature. That’s what makes me happy 99% of the time I’d say. Sadly I didn’t think I could shoehorn fried chicken and a concert into my biblical homage, but games fit in nicely!

(That was the "Die, heretic scum!" Emo Philips joke. Check it out. Sony is the devil ;-)

So I took your advice, and what a weird, yet incredibly funny comedian! I found him offputting at first, but his routine has real depth. Thanks for the tip.

> My piles of books, they comfort me.

Maybe you're just joking, but it often happens to me (at least once a month) to just sit on my couch and look at the books on my bookshelves, it gives me peace of mind for a couple of precious moments.

Same here! I’ll do the same thing with audiobooks, and put together a giant playlist just to see how many hours I could listen to non-stop. For physical books you get the benefit of the smell and feel of them too. Books are just the best, for so many reasons. When you have a bunch you haven’t read, you can look at them and anticipiate the first time you’ll read them, and get that “Christmas Eve” feel for a minute. Having a lot in my book backlog is soothing, and conversely I’d get anxious if I felt I was running out of that backlog.

The value of a library is mostly in the books you haven't read... yet. Umberto Eco famously had a lot to say on this topic.

Nasim Taleb coined the wholly unnecessary word "antilibrary" to describe this, when really, it is the library containing only fully-digested books that is the degenerate case.

I do that on my Kindle account. It makes it even easier because the pile is invisible.

My solution is to download sample books from Amazon. I don't buy them unless I get to the end of the sample.

Having a kindle makes this quite convenient and I've taken to doing this as well. I find the sample size to be quite big enough to figure out if I'll end up liking it or not :)

Libraries are pretty great. Costs very little and you have some time pressure to get it done before having to return it. Most books don't get read more than once anyway, so it's a pretty nice money saver too.

"What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?" – Jerry Seinfeld

Although I totally get that different books are worth and important to different people to be had around as your own.

I now know that I suffer from electronic components tsundoku.

I buy various elements on AliExpress (RF emitters or detectors, nodemcu, wifi dongles,...) with the hope of using them ond day.

So far I used maybe 10% of what I accumulated and decided to stop buyi... oh look, a new wifi switch I could reflash!

Why would you buy a book you don't intend to read? Is it kind of like buying home decorations? I mean I know how my habits work, I go to a bookstore, browse books, start reading wait to see if the story catches or doesn't, buy it or keep looking. Once I've got the hook on that story I can't shelve it without finishing it. I don't understand how you could not. Maybe people buy the books with a different intention?

I think this is more common with non-fiction books.

I have a stack of chess books that's ever growing.

My one in one out strategy fell apart because the British Chess Championship is in town with the attendant giant book sale.

No more this week though.

I got a safari books online subscription and it cut down on the tech books I’ve bought but never read. Highly recommend.

yep, me too... except I started buying books again and now i've got a stack of books AND an online library waiting :(

I've been a Safari subscriber for a couple of years now, and subscribed to Packt's before that. It both cut down on the books I bought and dramatically increased how much I read. I would highly recommend anyone sign up for the free trial, then for a month if you liked it. The cost for a month is less than the cost of most of the books available.

I added this thread to favorites but I prob will never read the referenced article.

For those looking for the actual characters:

積読　[http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/%C0%D1%C6%C9]

I am collecting domain names. Each new idea must came along with domain bought. But each of them become expired in a year and my collection is not very big.

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