It’s a common experience for bookworms: You buy a new novel or nonfiction title and place it on your shelf or nightstand, but then you don’t actually read it.
Instead, that book joins a growing pile of texts waiting patiently to be picked up. The reading materials might sit in neat stacks, spill off shelves or gather metaphorical dust on a Kindle, but their unread reality remains the same.
In Japan, there’s a term for this phenomenon: tsundoku.
What is tsundoku?
“In general, tsundoku (積読) means piling up books that were bought out of curiosity but have never been read or will be read sometime in the future for various reasons,” Yoshihiro Yasuhara, an associate teaching professor of Japanese studies and Japanese coordinator for the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University.
