What’s in your Tsundoku?

At an author interview in Paris: Lauren Elkin - author of Scaffolding

If you’re a bibliophile like me, you can imagine my delight in discovering a fabulous new word: tsundoku. It is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. I love that the Japanese culture created a word specifically for this phenomenon. Thankfully, my dining room table allows me to indulge in a lifelong habit of tsundoku, and as hard as I’ve tried, I can’t stop.

I fully intend to read my books. Really. While some readers read one book at a time, I’m more of the type who reads 4-5 books at a time. I have physical books on my dining room table, in and on my nightstand, and many more on my bookshelves, even though I’ve been giving them away for the last seven years. Other books lie dormant in my now-closed Audible account. I also have audiobooks, as well as Kindle books, from my Libby account. To me, a home decor essential is at least one book in view.

My Tsundoku habit

My current buffet includes:

• Libby Audio

  • How to Raise the Perfect Dog - Cesar Milan

  • The 10 - E.A. Hanks

• Kindle

  • Dreams and Premonitions - Amy Newmark, Kelly Sullivan Walden

  • The Thin Book of Trust - Charles Feltman

  • Don’t Believe Everything you Think: Why your thinking is the beginning and end of suffering - Joseph Nguyen

  • Connect, Qualify, Close - Richard Van Der Blum

  • The Memoir Project - Marion Roach Smith

• Physical Books

  • Creating Transformational Metaphors - Marilyn Atkinson

  • Living Service - The Journey of a Prosperous Coach - Melissa Ford

  • Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book - Allison K Williams

  • The 2-Hour Job Search - Using Technology to get the right job faster - Steve Dalton

  • Craft in the Real World - Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping - Matthew Salesses

  • I Don’t Want To, I Don’t Feel Like it - How Resistance Controls Your Life and What to Do About It - Cheri Huber, Ashwini Narayanan

  • The Coaching Blueprint - Agni Scott

  • The Gift of a Long Life: Personal Essays on the Aging Experience (the Birren Collection) - Anthology from Guided Autobiography Center

Seeing this list, I’m surprised to count 15 partially-read books. I had no idea my Tsundoku habit was this long.

This leads me to the August dare: what’s one book you’ve been meaning to read, but have set aside for whatever reason? What might happen if you set time aside to read it and take it in? I’m thinking about books where we might learn something, rather than beach reads, romance, or fantasy novels. The ones that might make us think twice, or nudge us outside our comfort zones.

What topic might you want to explore? What’s a book you’d like to read/listen to (and finish) by the end of August? There’s your dare for the month of August. I am daring myself to reduce my tsundoku list to half: that is, to finish 8 books by the end of the month. I will have to timeblock this.

What book is on your list?

Selkie and I just picked up another book from the library. Gotta go, it’s time to read!