Tsundoku
Just hours before heading off the Dunedin’s annual fund-raiser for the Regent Theatre, the 24-hour booksale, I read this tweet from New Zealand science writer Veronika Meduna:
great, the Japanese have a word for “the act of buying books and not reading them, leaving them to pile up”: tsundoku http://i.imgur.com/kRgaXcQ.jpg
I love that word. It’s neat, evoking such as specific thing.
I hate that word. There’s a guilty conscience for those books I haven’t read yet!
According to Rapheal Went, “It’s a clever pun, is tsundoku. “tsundeoku” means “things in a pile” and “doku” is “to read”.”
The illustration of tsundoku, above, looks to be from this reddit thread, drawn by the 12 year-old daughter of the writer ‘Wemedge’.
My living room doesn’t have just one pile of books to read, it has several. How about yours?
Here’s a couple of piles of books, stacked up for your viewing.
I do read the books I buy. Eventually.
Two of them I am reviewing for sciblogs – the book with the green spine on the left-most pile (Best Australian Science Writing 2013) and the one below it (the Philadelphia Chromosome*). I’ll get there.
I’ve previously reviewed Mad on Radium (two above Best Australian Science Writing 2013 in the same pile) and The Poisoner’s Handbook.
It’s time for Christmas presents, which I figure is excuse enough to bring up that wonderful word tsundoku. Books are a great option; maybe this little post will encourage some readers to try science-oriented books as presents.
Hopefully, the holiday break will offer time to read through some books… Is there a word for un-tsundoku-in-progress?
Footnotes
I’ve read several of those in the photo and am part-way through others of them. Excuse the lower resolution of the photo (it’s hard to read the titles!), but the file size of higher resolutions is a bit much for a blog post.
* The title for the Philadelphia Chromosome has a lowercase ‘t’ in ‘the’; in the original title it’s in italics, ‘the Philadelphia Chromosome’.
Other book-related articles on Code for life:
What books do you think geeks should read?
Rebecca Skloot on writing creative non-fiction
A forensic scientist tells it like it is (Expert Witness, written by Anna Sandiford who also writes here at sciblogs)
2 Responses to “Tsundoku”
In good timing, John Dupuis has his latest additions to his Best Science Books 2013.
Feel free to add your own suggestions. Some might be found in SciBooks, sciblogs’ book review blog.
More titles can be found in readers’ recommendations to GrrlScientist’s call for suggestions from her readers (see comments):
http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2013/dec/09/grrlscientist-readers-top-science-nature-books-2013