Tsundoku
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them.[1][2][3][4] The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.
The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang.[4] It combines elements of the terms tsunde-oku (積んでおく; "to pile things up ready for later and leave"), and dokusho (読書; "reading books").[citation needed] There are suggestions to use the word in the English language and include it in dictionaries like the Collins Dictionary.[4]
The American author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state in 1921.[5]
In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term "antilibrary", which was coined by Umberto Eco to characterize Jonathan Swift's description of a library in Gulliver's Travels and has been compared with tsundoku.[6][7]
See also
[edit]
- Bibliophilia
- Bibliomania
- The dictionary definition of 積ん読 at Wiktionary
References
[edit]- ^ Brooks, Katherine (19 March 2017). "There's A Japanese Word For People Who Buy More Books Than They Can Actually Read". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 16 October 2017.
- ^ Tobar, Hector (24 July 2014). "Are you a book hoarder? There's a word for that". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 October 2017.
- ^ Gerken, Tom (29 July 2018). "Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them". BBC News. Retrieved 30 July 2018.
- ^ a b c Crow, Jonathan (24 July 2014). "'Tsundoku', the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language". Open Culture. Retrieved 28 March 2021.
- ^ Dodson, Steve (7 February 2008). "A Quote on Bibliomania". Language Hat. Retrieved 24 July 2016.
- ^ Eco, Umberto; McLaughlin, M. L. (2005). On literature. Orlando: Harvest Book. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-15-100812-4.
- ^ Popova, Maria (24 March 2015). "Umberto Eco's Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones". The Marginalian. Retrieved 26 January 2022.
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