17 ms·
Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them
- znpy 6y agoglad to know I'm not the only one, I guess.
- minikites 6y agoI submit "Steamdoku" for the video game equivalent: https://www.whompcomic.com/comic/bargain-bane https://www.whompcomic.com/comic/bargain-bane
- pkaye 6y agoSudoku would be the equivalent for puzzles.
- schoen 6y agoI'm sure this is meant as a joke, but in case anyone is interested, according to Wiktionary: doku in "tsundoku" is 読 'read' (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%AA%AD#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%AA%AD#Japanese) doku in "sudoku" is 独 'single' (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8B%AC#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8B%AC#Japanese)
- johnmw 6y agoIs there a Japanese translation that means "pile up computer games?" I will start using that phase if it exists!
- WalterSear 6y agoI intend to buried with my steam library so that I can finally give it the eternity of attention that it needs.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoHow would you be buried with a digital collection? Will you have a hard-drive tucked under your arm?
- WalterSear 6y agoThat would be silly. The games will stored be in the video gaming room, just down the hall from chariot storage.
- nafizh 6y agoPeople who manage to read lots of books and also have children. How do you manage your day/time to do this? Please share any insights you might have.
- cafard 6y agoBedtime and commuting. When the demands on my time fell off, it was hard to get out of the habit of leaving books under the bed.
- stock_toaster 6y agoI read mostly in the evenings after the kids are put to bed, but I note that I watch relatively little television, which would likely otherwise consume that time.
- romanhn 6y agoAudiobooks is the only approach that worked for me. Listen when I commute, when I shop for groceries, when I do household chores. It's a pretty fragmented way to get through a book, but with a busy lifestyle, it's better than nothing! Been doing that for years. Edit: I should add that another optimization I got into this year has been to slowly ramp up the audio speed, which allows me to cover more content, albeit with some hit to comprehension, depending on book type. Currently listening to a non-fiction book at 1.6x.
- znpy 6y agodo you have an audible subscription or something? do you thing it's worth it?
- gnarbarian 6y agoI have one. It's well worth it. I've listened to more than 200 books in the last two years in my spare time. It's a skill that takes time but I absorb books just as well now via listening.
- odessacubbage 6y ago
- gerdesj 6y ago>So when put together, "tsundoku" has the meaning of buying reading material and piling it up. Where does the art thing come from in the article title? I think that slapping "art of" by anglophones (no idea what other language speakers get up to here) on anything remotely connected with Japan or Japanese might be considered a strange form of racism but nonetheless I think it is a form of racism. I doubt it is considered offensive by many but to me it sounds like a re-enforcement of a stereotype.
- claudiawerner 6y agoIt's debatable as to whether it's "racism" but it's certainly Orientalism[0). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Where does the art thing come from in the article title? A somewhat flowery but common English idiom used in preference to a bare noun or bare gerund phrase when referring to a generalized practice, particular in titles. Has nothing to do with Japan.
- jtxx 6y agoI remember this saying originating as a riff on The Art of War, but I have no evidence of that
- qiqing 6y agoNot a Japanese speaker, but I'm a native Chinese speaker. I know that Bingfa (The Art of War) could also be translated as The Practice of War or Methods of War. Translations are always interpretations because phrases aren't exact. The Art of JavaScript sure does sound more exotic than The Practice of JavaScript, so I can see why a translator would make that choice.
- SamBam 6y ago
- throw0101a 6y agoMeta: year is (2018)
- throw0101a 6y agoDiscussion the previous time this specific article was posted: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636829 Some other previous discussions on the term generally: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10283990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10283990 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22311690
- jxramos 6y agoThis is the problem that lead us to e-books in our house. Books wound up taking too much space, and with most of them going unread we needed to change tactics. Unread e-books is a lot more manageable.
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoE-books would largely solve this problem for me but they are normally way more expensive than the used physical book to not be worth the additional cost...
- ehw3 6y agoHey, I've finally found an art I'm good at! Of course my wife and I used to just call it being irresponsible about how much we spend on books. We don't have time to read them all. We finally had to get rid of about 1500 of them when we moved into a small place. Now we can just tell people we are masters of the ancient art of Tsundoku!
- linkdd 6y agohaving a huge physical library feels good though
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoIf you’ve a dedicated room lined with rich, mahogany shelves that reach high into your 30 foot ceilings, so high that they require their own dedicated ladders to traverse. The image I generally conjure up when someone says they’ve a lot of books is closer to that of the classic hoarder though.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoOr if they inherit it. My grandfather left me his collection of over 7000 books. It was thrown up the attic because I was deemed to young to read some of them. By the time I got my hands on them, they were crumbling due to bad storage and some of them were so old that if you try to fold the edge, it broke..like a biscuit. And then we had a devastating flood and lost it..I tried to dry them and saved about half the collection. A second flood ten years later took away the remaining books. Since then..I can’t bear to throw away even a magazine subscription. I guess that makes me a hoarder. Anyone knows how to break the book hoarding habit? It’s about time I let go of the trauma of the flood damage and water logged books.
- snicker7 6y agoI have lots of math books. And reading a page takes maybe an hour or so. The result is that 99% of my library is unread. No regrets.
- a_bonobo 6y agoThink of it as your wine-cellar, you wouldn't keep all those bottles after you've drunk them!
- akeck 6y agoSame here. I have a few "masters degrees" worth of books... physics, math, origami, Japanese, art/design, photography. I've had to force myself to slow drastically buying in favor of reading the ones I already have. Also, I'm running out of space.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoI have about 20 papers that I printed to read still sitting on my desk. I'll read them someday...
- giu 6y agoSame here. Every time someone checks out my bookshelf I tell them that I only read a few select pages from most of those books during my studies and that's it. No regrets, too!
- jolmg 6y ago> heart is an arrow. it demands aim to -- I wonder how that finishes. EDIT: "land true"[1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9116925-the-heart-is-an-arrow-it-demands-aim-to-land https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9116925-the-heart-is-an-arr...
- minikomi 6y ago... land true? ... fly straight? ... be useful..?
- tasogare 6y agoTaberu: the Japanese Art of Eating. Kaimonosuru: the Japanese Art of Buying Groceries. Nomikai: the Japanese Art of Drinking too Much With Coworkers. It’s about time Western media stop essentializing Japanese culture and make something special out of a normal things that happen everywhere.
- nullsense 6y agoTabesugi: The Japanese Art of Stuffing Your Face
- Symbiote 6y agoDon't worry, they do it to other Western cultures just as much. (Mediterranean diet, Danish hygge, etc.)
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago> Kaimonosuru: the Japanese Art of Buying Groceries. I smell a NYT Bestseller!
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoA less idiotic purchase would be to buy art in form of paint or sculpture :)
- arvinsim 6y agoI used to have this problem until I got a Kindle. I buy books less now. I guess there is just something about a physical book that makes it desirable outside actually reading it.
- chris_st 6y agoIt's actually gotten worse for me with the kindle books... we often get e-credits from Amazon for asking for a day or two latter shipping arrival, and these pile up, and they expire, so... Hey, got $8 off on an ebook, I have one I want to read eventually, so let's get it, and... another on the pile!
- alexhutcheson 6y agoI now collect "sample chapters" on my Kindle, rather than buying new books. Highly recommend that approach - in my case most of the time I don't want to continue after reading the sample, so I move on to another one.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoI actually buy more books now that I have a Kindle. It happened like this: I know that the Kindle is a doorway into reading all the novels and non-fiction books I ever wanted, because they can be freely downloaded from LibGen. At the same time, the Kindle is an absolutely terrible format for reading poetry: often poetry relies on elaborate typesetting that EPUB/MOBI doesn’t support, some editions of poetry tightly connect the poems and the paper and binding used, etc. As I reflected on this, I was inspired to set about building a huge home library of modern poets’ collected works; basically any name connected with the 20th-century canon, I have bought it or am planning to buy it. I probably would have never thought to do this if it weren’t for the Kindle!
- papito 6y agoI felt like audiobooks was cheating, but I got into it, and I have no regrets. Being able to sit down and read a book in peace is a luxury of the rich.
- treeman79 6y agoAudio books are a life saver. Eyesight is iffy, really helps pass the bad days. Also great when doing chores
- MivLives 6y agoEspecially once I started listening to them at faster speeds. I find it easier to pay attention at higher speeds as I get less time for mind to wander
- redkoala 6y agoI find personally that works when I can be free of outside interruptions. If I have to multi-task or respond to others, I can lose the follow track. Also no other deep thought when listening to the books, it has to be really active listening. I find active reading much faster than active listening if it’s the only thing I do, to the point that I read ahead on podcast transcripts instead of listening to them.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoThis! Totally agree. I can’t listen to normal speeds anymore. Otoh, I can listen to 4-6 books/week. When I can’t get audiobooks, I just use Alexa to read from kindle books.
- Robelius 6y agoDrifting off onto topics when listening/reading is what I enjoy the most! When I'm reading fantasy, I'll have to pause after a cool fight scene while my imagination reverts to a 6 year old thinking of all the scenarios where the protagonist is winning or saying a line and being smooth. When I'm reading/listening to non-fiction and trying to understand the writers intent or what the words means to me. Not saying that your way is wrong or any less of an experience since the way you enjoy it the most is what matters. For me, reading was painfully slow and I thought listening to audiobooks would be a more efficient way of going through books. I listened to audiobooks at higher than 1x speed, thinking I would get the same experience and remove the wasteful rabbit holes that I would go down when narrators spoke too slowly, but audiobooks weren't doing it for me like reading was. When I went back to books, I realized the mental rabbit holes were what made books enjoyable. I'm back at using audiobooks as my primary method, but now I'm aggressive with the pause button as soon as I feel myself drifting. Again, not saying that my way is superior. I just think it's funny how people can see the same situation play out, and have very different takes on it.
- qazpot 6y agoUmberto Eco has an interesting take on this, he call it Antilibrary. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib... TLDR (quoting from the article above)- Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- varjag 6y agoIn USSR there was this philistine fashion of buying deficit books just to put them on your shelf and to look cultured to your guests. Now I know they were Tsundoku practitioners.
- andrewzah 6y agoNot sure what the USSR has to do with anything here. People do this in America all the time, especially in the business world. It's fashionable to look like one reads books, yet people don't want to spend the time to properly do just that. https://www.booksbythefoot.com/shop/pc/Books-by-Color-c3.htm https://www.booksbythefoot.com/shop/pc/Books-by-Color-c3.htm
- arminiusreturns 6y agoI once worked for an extremely wealthy guy for a bit. He built a brand new office building and during setup I was in his very expensive looking back office... and I realized the nice and old looking books weren't even books... they were finely done hollow blocks of book looking replicas with real curved leather spines and everything... I will never forget how that summed up the man to me. I quit not long after.
- Symbiote 6y agoMy grandma bought the last apartment of a new block, and to her surprise it came fully furnished -- with all the crap the interior designer had chosen. It had been the one on show. The second bedroom was themed blue and black. I got about 30 new sci fi books, which had been chosen only for the colour of the spine.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoOh boy. I have been listening to audiobooks since 2010.... hardly spent 5-20 days since when I didnt have an audiobook playing while going to sleep. I spend a year finishing wallander series. Then another year for Lee child, then another or John grisham. Other than those, read almost 40-80 books yearly. *wink 2x playback. I have to say, books are now a part of my personality. There are times when I dig up a copy of any wallander series or Lee child because I want to hear dick hill. Same for narrators like orlagh cassidy, Steve barthurst, Simon vance, and hundreds of others. My most recent love has been Louise penny series. I thoroughly enjoyed that series. Not to start with either department Q or Lars Kepler. Those two were brutal and enjoyed the rawness of it.
- russellbeattie 6y agoPast Me always thinks he knows exactly what Present Me should be doing with my time. Past Me is a lazy asshole who doesn't want to make the effort at the moment, so he does something like buying a book and leaves it for Present Me to finish. Everything from the dishes to articles to books. Sometimes that jerk doesn't even bother to make a long term memory, so I open my Kindle reader and there's books in there I barely recognize. The Complete History of Czarist Russia?? Who the hell does Past Me think I am? It's like he thinks between then and now, I've suddenly become a completely different person. Of course, I try not to do this to Future Me. I might bookmark a few sites, added a few movies to my watch list and signed up for an class or whatever. But I'm sure he'll have the time and focus that I don't have now. I'm sure of it. He'll thank me, really, I'm sure.
- brtkdotse 6y agoI do this all the time, except with domain names.
- imtringued 6y agoPeople have more money than time. It's that simple.
- nOObie1 6y agoI think I might have a solution!
- mft_ 6y agoI don’t think it’s about money - books can be cheap or free, and/or money might not matter in the equation for an individual. I think it’s more that people have more interests than they ultimately have time to concentrate on.
- qz2 6y agoMy wife has money and time. It's an aspirational purchase for her but she never gets motivated to read the things. Me, I have a kindle and have read everything on it.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoEh. I started buying books when I was busted broke. I just ended up keeping them, and never ceasing. I read them to death and bought more as I discovered more. I had wine boxes packed full that I had to haul everywhere. It was worth it. I've just had to pack up my collection again as we're moving out of the city. Happy to do it and I won't be downsizing for the sake of downsizing—ever, if I can help it. I love wandering through and re-reading things I'd put aside for some time. Poetry, in particular, is good for that.
- zerr 6y agoIs there a separate term for those who read books and losing interest half-way?
- knorthfield 6y agoDiscerning
- bluehex 6y agoThey kind of miss some of the charm of this word in translation. Yes “tsumu” is pile up and “doku” is reading but “(v)de-oku” is to do that verb in preparation or “for later”. So tsunde-oku which you can contract to tsundoku also literally just means to pile up something for later. It’s a wonderful pun.
- rmetzler 6y agoI must admit this is something I certainly can relate to. I buy probably more than average programming books and can only read some of them when I buy them. But a situation will come up, where it’s really handy to just reach into the book shelf / library and have one or two good books at hand to read and solve the current issue I run into or give them to a cooperator to level up the skills. And I must admit I did something similar for electronics projects.
- aqsalose 6y agoParaphrasing Umberto Eco, there are two kinds of libraries: one kind are collections of trophies and mementos, but the other kind can be formidable resource in right hands. The latter one is knowledge management tool, and contains also unread books because it is useful to also manage ones future knowledge. If you want to go the deep end, in 1970s or so Eco wrote guidebook to academic thesis writing that comes with a tutorial how to bootstrap a bibliography and an index card system for your research or other professional purposes, of course most conveniently (though maybe not most cheaply) used with your personal research library that contains whole of your bibliography. That said, there is also a failure modes of sorts. One that used to be famous was people who collected a respectable looking library (or had someone collect it) but never read or used it themselves, only show off their supposedly good taste in books to visitors. Other, related one, but more in the spirit of plans "I will do all the cool things I wanted ro do when I have time after retirement" involves similar mismanaging ones time and thus spending too much time collecting the library compared to using it.
- wool_gather 6y ago> a tutorial how to bootstrap a bibliography and an index card system for your research or other professional purposes Is this related to/inspired from Zettelkasten?
- jakubwojciech 6y agoIs there a term for buying games and not playing them?
- ggrelet 6y agoYes, it's at the end of the article: > One of the most popular interpretations concerned video games, with various people referencing their "vast, untouched software libraries" on game distribution platforms like Steam. And some people even joked the service should rename their annual week of discounting the "Steam Tsundoku Sale". But credit to Ronnie Filyaw of Whomp! comic, who came up with this concise definition [0] [0] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/E80B/production/_102730495_steamdoku.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/E80B/production/...
- Hamuko 6y agoYes, you're a game collector, which is a distinct and separate concept from gamer.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI have this, but with boardgames
- human 6y agoHas anyone noticed how having books in your background on Zoom calls seems to have become a status symbol? I see it all the times recently.
- yohannparis 6y agoOwning books, specially niche ones, has always been a status symbol.
- human 6y agoYeah, you don't see many Harry Potter books on shelves!
- geniium 6y agoI think everyone is more or less doing this. The question is now, are you going to do something about it?
- hardlianotion 6y agoIf you practice Tsundoku, you'll also want to master the art of talking about books you haven't read https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0049U444U/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0049U444U/ref=dp-kindle-redirec... Maybe the last book you'll read?
- cbozeman 6y agoThere's an element of charm to reading a book about talking about books you haven't read.
- Tistel 6y agoI will get threw them eventually!
- wazoox 6y agoI read quite a lot of books, probably about 2 per week. However I also have a bad case of tsundoku: there are 5 or 6 unfinished books on my nightstand (I probably should give up on some of those). There are about 100 books waiting to be read in my bedroom alone. Some have waited for more than 5 years :)
- at_a_remove 6y agoWarren Zevon said "We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them" and I mostly agree. Most book acquisitions are an aspiration to experience and a desire to flower in some particular direction, to pass a little afternoon in enjoyment, or even to master a concept. I look at my unread, unwatched, and unheard media and I think it's a window into who I would like to be, even if only something so shallow as the years free to enjoy them.
- thomasahle 6y ago> it's a window into who I would like to be Is there an advantage to buying the books, rather than just putting them on your Goodreads "To read" shelf?
- benrbray 6y agoFor me, the ability to consume infinite information electronically is both a blessing and a curse. I tend to have decision paralysis when searching for information online -- is this method for learning X the best one? what else do I need to know about X? Am I ready to learn about X? Before starting X, what should I know? In the end, I'll end up reading all about the history of Y on Wikipedia, and never even begin with X. So, recently when I get interested in a random topic, I'll read some book reviews online and pull the trigger on a used book for under $20. I know that one day, I'll get that spark of curiosity again; when it happens, I know I have a solid book there, waiting for me.
- iosonofuturista 6y agoYes, they look so nice in a shelf.
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoFor me, they stay at the forefront of my conscious, so it's difficult to just turn the other way around or pretend they don't exist somewhere. It's easy to get rid of goodreads, I will just never visit the page, I can't do that with physical books.
- 6y ago
- mr-developer 6y agoHow about Udemy courses?
- 7thaccount 6y agoThere is a book called "Lost in Translation" with one of these words on every page with the country of origin, pronunciation, definition, and some beautiful artwork I believe. The finns have a unit of measurement dealing with the gap between how far a reindeer can travel before needing to relieve itself. Tsundoku is also included.
- thomasahle 6y agoThere is also an academic version: Printing papers you would like to read. At one point I had a half-meter stack of unread papers collecting dust.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoHa! My wife's Professor gave her the job of reading a hundred papers and creating a spreadsheet of pertinent data (dating methods, accuracy, age, comparables and so on). So that's one way of handling it.
- newdude116 6y agoThis is uttermost Bullshit. And a library should be a collection of ideas. This is why 1. I buy books that I may have read already (e.g. as an ebook or library book) 2. Might read in the future 3. Might never read but I know they contain great ideas (Nassim Nicholas Taleb said something similiar). I always discard/sell/gift CD and DVDs after I have copied them to my 10TB HDD.
- avaldeso 6y agoThis seems like a case of curicubaitsu, the Japanese art of writing clickbait headlines.
- bluesquared 6y agoI have the same thing with saving threads on HN/Reddit...
- mmhsieh 6y agoif i have 1-2 books unread, i might read them; if i have 100-200 on the shelf unread, i am less apt to read even one. so i have pulled a few books off the shelf and put them on my table and i have started reading them.
- wool_gather 6y agoI have a trick I've adopted recently for nonfiction that has helped me immensely to read more and keep reading.¹ If a portion of a book is unappealing for any reason -- I feel like I already know it, it's irrelevant, it's impenetrable, whatever -- just skip ahead. It's still there if I need to come back to it. And this preserves the reading as an enjoyable and motivated experience rather than a slog that's easy to procrastinate over. In particular, if a later section turns out to not make sense without the bit that I skipped, I'm now highly motivated to go back and understand it. If you find yourself hampered by a kind of "completionism" like I do, you might find this very freeing and satisfying. I used this tactic on a book recently that had a lot of new-to-me gems of information at the beginning and end, but fluff in the middle. Previously I would have lost out on the stuff at the end, because I would have set the book aside at some point and dreaded coming back to it. --- ¹ I absolutely didn't invent this, but I'm also not sure where I picked it up.
- signaru 6y agoI want to call those unread material "tsundokuments"