Tsundoku
Term for buying books but not reading them
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them.[1][2][3][4] The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.
The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang.[4] It combines elements of the terms tsunde-oku (積んでおく; "to pile things up ready for later and leave"), and dokusho (読書; "reading books").[citation needed]
The American author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state in 1921.[5] The Canadian poet Robert W. Service remarked on the phenomenon in his poem, "Book Lover".[6]
In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term antilibrary, which was coined by Umberto Eco to characterize Jonathan Swift's description of a library in Gulliver's Travels and has been compared with tsundoku.[7][8]
