Recently, while moving several piles of books (31 titles) from the floor to another place on the floor to make space for my office chair, I experienced a moment of clarity during which I felt like I had arrived at the end of a manic episode and was confronting the aftermath.
Hoarders have been known to describe how seemingly insignificant detritus—an old cup, a yellowed newspaper, a toothbrush—are so meaningful to them that they couldn’t possibly be thrown away.
I, too, was capable of justifying the presence of each of my individual piled up volumes. There was Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence. Purchased on the recommendation of a friend, begun at some point, set aside not because not good but because quietly usurped, knowing that someday I would get back to young Thomas on his bicycle. The usurper? Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. I wanted to soak in Marías for a little while, but apparently not long enough to finish. Next, Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, awaiting comparison to the only other one I’d read, Tobias Smollett’s. And adjacent in stack and century, Tristram Shandy, half-finished, waiting for the right mood to strike. Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, uncracked—a purchase inspired by Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. Bergman’s The Magic Lantern, just begun, which I picked up because Dorthe Nors mentioned it somewhere, and, below that, her story collection Wild Swims…
Other stacks contained more yet-to-be read novels by authors I loved, books bought for research, various computer programming guides, more than one how-to book on writing, an excess of belles lettres, journals, books by friends, and, perhaps the most pathological and well-represented category, various iterations of the book I had to buy to magically solve the problems in whatever project I was currently working on.
Read the full article: https://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-tsundoku-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-book-piles
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