The Japanese have a term for the act of buying books but letting them pile up without reading them. It’s tsundoku. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Tsundoku”
If you love books, then chances are you’ve had the experience of buying a book and then leaving it there unread and then other books piling up around it. We don’t really have a word for that in English, but there is a word in Japanese for that.
Oh, I think I know it. Or I did know it. I don’t know it anymore. What is it?
Sundoku.
Oh, yeah. There we go. Yeah. Sundoku.
What surprised me about this word is that it’s really old. It goes back to the 19th century. They had the problem of books being piled up around them.
Imagine that.
I believe it.
I heard there were Sundoku support groups online.
Sundoku support groups. Yeah.
I saw a cartoon recently that had the different strata of the books, the sad ones at the bottom that you’ll never get to, but you can’t remove because of the support foundation for the ones above.
At some point, it just becomes sediment, right?
The books aren’t books anymore.
Oh, my gosh.
They’re structural.
I actually have a pile just like that on my bedroom floor.
