Tsundoku

I had a bedroom converted into a library when I bought my house. It&#x27;s about half filled with books now. I&#x27;ve read about 95% of the fiction and about 15% of the non-fiction.<p>I get a lot out of the library. It&#x27;s a <i>great</i> place to work or study. It&#x27;s both devoid of and filled with distraction. (I also had a bedroom converted to an office... which, except for the girlfriend&#x27;s sewing table, is almost exclusively used for PC gaming...) Having all those unread books around means I&#x27;m never bored, and I&#x27;m always subtly being pushed to learn the things I want to learn.

I don&#x27;t really think this word is actually a thing that Japanese people really say.<p>The Japanese wikipedia version of this article is also a stub, and there&#x27;s only 550K results in Japanese google, which is pretty much identical to the amount if you search &quot;Tsundoku&quot; in English. If you search for the phrase in hiragana only, the results become even less at 75K.

Guilty as charged. My stack is mostly out-of-date programming tomes that were worth reading when I bought them. I also have a collection of Audible audiobooks that I bought to spend my built up credits before cancelling.

May also apply to videogames, comics, digital media, hobby&#x2F;craft supplies, etc.

Me and my wife does it because we value and want to reflect to our kids and others ...there&#x27;s no English word descriptive enough here... but in Greek it&#x27;s called paideia, German: bildung. Danish&#x2F;Norwegian: dannelse. Closest word is probably education.. but it&#x27;s too narrow.

Owning more books than you&#x27;ll read is good for you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;personal-growth&#x2F;do-i-own-too-many-books" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;personal-growth&#x2F;do-i-own-too-many-books</a><p>You never know where reading will take you next.

I usually buy books all excited about a topic I love (history or behavioral economics etc.) but they just pile up. Work pressure and exhaustion during the week and family stuff on the weekend is overwhelming any reading time :(

Somewhat related; when a friend bought his first home, he filled bookshelves in the living room with books that were popular in his circles as part of decorating and a means of social manipulation.<p>He never had and likely never will read any of them, it was primarily an attempt to buy social favor with guests. He&#x27;d just say he had a poor memory for books he read long ago whenever someone tried discussing them at a house party.<p>It was unnerving how effective this was.

I too find a six-sentence long wikipedia article to be &quot;hacker&quot; &quot;news&quot;.

Hobbyists use GAS for a similar practice. It stands for Gear Acquisition Syndrome where you buy much more hobby-related gear that you can use. Photography, electronics and electronic music are some hobbies particularly known for this.

Just checked my steam account...

I always have a pile of fiction near at hand, but I&#x27;m relatively good with getting through those. My non-fiction pile is the one that gathers the most dust...

As much as I like to buy books I have realized it is much more economical to just check it out from the library.

This is me and HN. I save so many articles to Pocket but only are ever fully read.

I am absolutely sure this was posted due to the IndieHackers newsletter

I do it with browser tabs.