There is a word for not reading. Or rather, there is a term for collecting books and never opening their covers. That word is tsundoku.
The Japanese word tsundoku stands for a state in which many readers find themselves. The term is actually a combination of several words. Alone, doku means “to read”, tsunde represents stacking things, and oku means “to leave something for a while”. With all of this in mind, a very literal translation of tsundoku is “to stack reading materials and leave them for a while.”
The term brings to mind people who buy books with every intention of reading them, but instead their books simple sit on bedside tables and accumulate over time. There is something elegant about the way that the word captures a practice that is familiar to many of us, and I am tempted to begin a campaign to popularize its use.
But I always was a word thief.
Since I have never studied Japanese, I can’t promise that my interpretation of the term is entirely accurate – though the wikipedia article on it makes a compelling argument – so if any of you know a bit of the language, feel free to provide input.
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Image Attribution: Hokusai, Egrets from Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing, 1823
Reblogged this on Simone Paradis Hanson.
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Reblogged this on The Owl Lady.
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There’s a name for everything, isn’t there?
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There certainly seems to be! I do love stumbling over new (to me) vocabulary though.
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Great acquisition for our vocabulary! 🙂 But when paper books are stacked, eventually they’ll all get read. When books accumulate in an e-reader, the stack just keeps growing and it stays unread, because the books are out of sight, out of mind.
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I’m minoring in Japanese studies in school and I am still new to it all, so I can’t say for sure, but I will most definitely ask my sensei if the term is accurate.
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Thanks for looking into it!
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Sooooooo then it’s a dirty word 😉
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Ha! Very much so.
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I asked a couple of my friends who speak Japanese and they said it’s accurate. This was a great post, cool that there’s a word for that!
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Good to know! Thanks for asking around. It really is an interesting term.
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“[…] collecting books and never opening their covers.” Balderdash! Let us have words!
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Some of us just have bigger eyes than stomachs! …Though I suppose that turn of phrase doesn’t work as well for books. Bigger eyes than brains? I probably shouldn’t claim that one.
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From what little I know of Japanese, tsundoku may very well be a word (like sudoku) that was originally a much longer phrase. Anyway, we get the idea.
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Sooo… I’m a tundokee, am I?
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Ha! So many of us are.
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