A library of books I (probably) haven't read
When is it enough books? I'm not sure there's an answer to that.
Today, thanks to my friend Margot Smit sharing this article about owning a library of books that you might not have read and may never get around to reading — I find that likely my “enough books” answer comes down to bookshelf real estate.
Also referred to as an “antilibrary” some refer to it using the Japanese term: Tsundoku.
His preferred label is a loanword from Japan: tsundoku. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. Its morphology combines tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dokusho (reading books).
Interestingly, I feel like I do a bit more of the tsunde-oku than the dukusho. I’m VERY talented at letting things pile up. In ADHD land we call these doom piles. You might make a pile of items that sort of go together, but you’re not sure where they live exactly, or you haven’t gotten around to putting them back in their home, or the worst case is that you’re not REALLY done with them yet, so you don’t want put them away or you might forget you’re working on the project and then never finish the project. These doom piles have also been contained in doom drawers (we all have that one drawer in the kitchen that has rubber bands, old electronic charging cords, pens that don’t work, knick-knack gadgets, twist ties, and tape, right?) or when the doom piles pile up we might even have a doom closet, doom room, or (gasp) a doom garage or attic. All I’m saying is that for the ADHD brain, it can be really difficult to put things away — but books! — books go on the bookshelf. Unless you’re reading them or referencing them or wanna reference them for a project or want to suggest them to a friend — generally they have a place where they live — the bookshelf.
I love collecting interesting books on soil health, biology, biomimicry, ecology, philosophy, animals, plants, and pattern/systems thinking. But most of the time I have not read the books. Well, not READ the books as maybe 1/4 or so I have listened to the audiobook, loved the book, and decided I had to purchase the book just in case I wanted to reference the book in some other way (audiobooks are very difficult to reference as there isn’t an easy index so you can look up by keyword).
The other day a colleague asked me if I knew anything about tensegrity (a la Buckminster Fuller) and I said, no, but I’d be happy to search my reference library to find some info. So I pulled out books on engineering in biology and found tensegrity in the index. I was able to provide a few resources she hadn’t yet found and scan some of the excerpts for her to reference.
I tend to buy many of my books through Thriftbooks and I used to not care how “rough” the quality of the used book was — that made it more affordable and therefore I could have more of the books I wanted. BUT there are some books that come from moldy homes. And when I pull those books down off the shelf and look through them, the mold spores get pulled up through my nostrils and I get SICK — headache-on-the-verge-of-migrane, low-grade fever, itchy eyes, runny nose, and sneezy. It’s bad news. So I’ve decided one of these days I’ll need to pull those books off the shelf and make myself sick to identify which are those moldy books and perhaps rip them up to add to my compost.
Do you have a ton of books you’ve never read? What is your reason for keeping them around? What are your favorite topics to collect on your bookshelves? Do you have doom piles?
100 percent pattern recognition for me! But a few years ago I Marie Kondo-ed my too so all that remains are a few of the best/most personally important photography books I own (the rest went to Las Foto Project’s library), everything I have on veggie gardening, permaculture, California native plants and mushrooms growing. Plus a few old Chinese language text books and English-Chinese dictionaries, a few of the novels that have made the biggest impact on me and lastly 10 or less books I bought in the last year but haven’t read yet. Overall I probably have 1/10 of the books I had at the height of my Tsundoku!