The Pleasures of Tsundoku: How I learned to stop worrying and love book piles
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It also used to give me tremendous pleasure giving a friend, a colleague or even a random encounter a book I myself had enjoyed at some point, although after the emergence of kindles, that became less and less appreciated (although some will still accept recommendations).
I pile up books on my desk, on shelves, next to my bed, and it gives me pleasure just looking at them. I hate accumulating physical possesions except books.
I look at my shelf (and my desk, and next to my bed) and it's a monument to things I have had fleeting interests in and things that are life long passions, stories that sits so deep inside me that they have come to define part of who I am, but of course also stories that were mere dreams and left no mark (although I have another pile in a corner for those books that I intend to get rid of... One day).
I love books, it has been the one constant in my life since I was very young child.
I get rid of any book that can be found used for under a couple bucks or so used online, unless I am actively reading it or need it for something. I can always get it again later when I feel like reading it, just bookmark a link to the place it's sold.
> 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.
At least, it's a good excuse to buy more books that one can read. :)
[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...
It’s a very different feeling from something as organized as a library, or Powell’s here in Portland. You never knew what you’d find next, on what topic, or in what condition. It was endless exploration, pure delight.
Faqir Chand is still in business. They don’t have a website, but the photos on their Twitter look just as I remember: https://twitter.com/faqirchandbooks
At least when I used to enjoy it 20 years ago.
The place has colleges, schools, parks, and book shops- a whole lot of them. And the book shops kept and organized books randomly. Many focused on academic books but most did not.
It was a pleasure walking through the roads and buying second hand books based on pure interest and exploration.
These days, I keep only the few books that are better served in print form (e.g. references, cookbooks, art anthologies), or that are rare/out of print. Everything else I get rid of immediately after reading, or read only a Kindle. It's very similar to my philosophy for furniture: I refuse to possess an object if I am not going to use it and/or draw direct pleasure from that specific object on a regular basis. Individual books rarely make the cut.
For 95% of the stuff I read (novels, pop non-fiction, etc.), I never even buy a physical copy of a book. Books have a huge parasitic cost. I'd rather have a clean living space and easy moves. For me, the mental benefit of just not seeing clutter is hugely beneficial.
I believe we all fell for the the new trend of minimalism and belief that owning too much stuff hurts us because a stoic philosopher wrote about it around 3rd century AD.
But I mean, who cares? Nobody should tell you what is right and what is wrong. - Feel pleasure from stacking books? Do it! - Don't want clutter, get kindle
As easy as that. I don't really understand the modern pressure of optimising life. It produces anxiety and in the end rather has diminishing returns rather than a calm mind.
Is the discovery that other people have a word for the accumulation of unread books really enough to make the attached anxiety melt away?
I'm the grandchild of librarians on both sides, and I've had the urge to archive and catalogue and preserve and retain for my whole life. It's crippling. There's a perverse illusion buried in the need to collect and archive books and possessions. I wish the author could have done more than scratch the surface for me!
I won't get rid of my technical reference books, and my 1st editions.
I have come to realize I can't waste anymore time on bad writing though.
I have way to many books, and I need to get rid of 90% of them. I just can't toss them though.
In other words, just toss them in the dumpster yourself, unless there's a particular reason you're library might be interested in them (for example, if you have a large collection of Tintin books or Bill Peet children's books in like-new condition, they will probably be interested, because those books are timeless).
I think one thing is to consider what alternate activity one is engaging in as procrastination away from reading. And hypertext whether long-form essay, news article, social media post, comment thread, let alone video media, is such an effective consumer of attention.
Vary it up. I read deep technical books, classics, and serious non fiction, but I also read humorous sci-if fantasy novels directed at teenagers.
Be ok that you got distracted. I mostly read on an ereader and it’s absolutely delightful and incredible to be able to go look up a reference you don’t know or understand on Wikipedia to get context. Just make it back to your book your own time.
And finally, as others have said, just read. Preferably just do it before or in bed.
I used to be a voracious reader, then I basically stopped and I'm now trying to get a good pace again.
"Read what you like" is the most important thing, too often one tries to read a book because someone recommended it, or gifted it, or because it's an aspirational thing ("everybody should read Ghoete's Faust").
Just give those up and read something else.
It is also how reading fewer books again comes about. Though not at the same time of course.
And from time to time my bookshelf becomes obsolescent. Not only because what I read changes. What I want to keep changes too. Beloved multi reads I know from experience won’t be binding again.
In fairness, a moderate amount of the videos I watch causes me to look for books. They are book adjacent…so maybe that is a strategy to consider.
Reading can help unwind and get you ready for sleep, and reading in bed becomes a routine very fast — I mean, you go to bed every day in any case.
My house is not a dump, but it's ground level and not temperature controlled. Somehow, the little critters reached my books stacked high on a ledge in the far corner of my room.
As soon as lumber prices go down, my plan is to build a sealed bookshelf and line it with silica packets. I'll have to toss my books into ziplocs and freeze them before loading the shelves. What a mess.
Leave a few Naphthalene balls around your books. That will take care of book lice.
I also greatly enjoy the selection and curation processes.
That being said, I think it is valuable to be aware of why I don't read my books.
Currently, I am sometimes reading Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation". Despite being a good book that has definitely helped me understand a novel viewpoint on postmodern society, it is written so dense that I can read no more than one of its essays per week.
Then there is "The five invitations". This book is about death and dying and how we can live so we do not regret anything at our deathbed. Reading it sometimes makes me uncomfortable. I do not want to be confronted with death. But then again, I am not the one to decide when I have to face death. Again, this leads to putting the book back in the shelf and reading it only sporadically.
And then there are a bunch of books which i stopped reading when I thought I got the gist of it or which were just not relevant to me anymore.
The physical act itself of hunkering down with my head pointed downwards is just so unappealing doing more than enough of that with programming. Being able to take a walk and enjoy the outsides while listening (or in general filling the empty slots when i have to take a bus, go to the store etc) is just so liberating it has become an integral part of my life.
Also, dust covers on hardbacks, do you toss them or keep them?
The Zotero application has a great feature that pulls a book's details from worldwide library catalogues in most cases if there is an ISBN.
My current list of keepers is only three titles as a starting point and two are technical books.