The Tsundoku Book Club

In this new year, a quarter of the way through the decade, I’m starting my own book club. I’m calling it the Tsundoku Book Club. Currently I’m the sole member, but I’m openly soliciting anyone willing to join me.

Tsundoku is, of course, the wonderful and pointed and elegant and alarmingly accurate Japanese term referring to the act (the art?) of accumulating too many books on one’s nightstand or bookshelves than could be read, of piling up books for later and not reading them. This is me, the problem is me.

There have been a number of sound and logical arguments made by famous readers and writers and thinkers in defense of a healthy and robust library, even (or sometimes especially) including unread books, but I won’t get into that because quite frankly I’m just hoarding books for the love of them, for the smell of them, for the feel of the paper in my hands. Used books, new books, library books, gifted books. The pages are imbued with past and present and future ghosts. I love reading and I love books and you can’t do one without the other.

When I order books into the shop, usually a task I reserve for late into the night, I’m in my own universe of a dark sky and sleepy creatures around me. I leave the woods and enter into this weird rainbow road of flashing lights and extremely unrealistic optimism, collecting mushrooms and coins as I zoom around down rabbit holes. All of a sudden: yes! what a cover and oh a mysterious title! and oh didn’t know that author wrote a new book! and look at those shiny silver circles on the cover and I’m clicking and I’m adding and there’s no restraint or even research and then a week later Jon gets a few boxes in the warehouse.

In any case, we just got some new books into the shop. As usual, I‘ve stacked them all up in my piles, squeezing them onto shelves, into bins and baskets, in stacks on the floor along the walls of my office/closet. I’ve returned from the library with my tote bag full of books that would be impossible for me to read in 3 weeks, as though I don’t already have several overdue library books waiting for me on my desk.

In the new year, I have thus far made no New Year’s Resolutions. Is it too late for them? If I were to have resolutions, I’m sure at least one of them would be to read some of these unread books. But alas, I have none, so I will just have to do my best.

It is a habit of life, this hunger, this misplaced ambition, this overestimation of my reading abilities. I’m going to work on it, enrol into a 12-step program, make some lists.

In the meantime, I’m the president of my own book club. My cat is the vice-president. My other cat is the secretary. Maybe I’ll get some stickers made.