Do you have tsundoku?

This was not the post I intended. I had a pretty lengthy post about a author who had a release

yesterday of a new series, talking about all of her different series' and pictures. As I finished up, I thought I hit "enter". Then I saw a flash of "do you want to save or you will lose...". And then it was gone. I never got to save or choose or anything. Ugh. Will try again tomorrow.

But I did see a blurb about this and thought it was interesting and worth a chuckle.

Tsundoku

Not a version of that number game with boxes that you have to figure out what numbers go in them, for some reason. I never could figure that out. Did I say I hated math and the thought of numbers still makes me nervous?

Tsundoku: A Japanese word that means the desire to buy more books than you can physically read in a lifetime. It comes from the Japanese words tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku” meaning “to leave for a while”) and “doku” (meaning “to read”).

Now this is not bibliomania. The term “bibliomania” emerged in England around the same time as “tsundoku.” Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an English cleric and bibliographer, wrote Bibliomania, or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance  in the 1800s, outlining a fictional “neurosis” that prompted those suffering from it to obsessively collect books of all sorts. 

"Bibliomania has a dark past, documented more as a pseudo-illness that inspired real fear than a harmless knack for acquiring books we won’t have time to read. “Some collectors spent their entire fortunes to build their personal libraries,” Lauren Young wrote for Atlas Obscura. “While it was never medically classified, people in the 1800s truly feared bibliomania.”  Tsundoku seems to better capture the lighter side of compulsive book shopping, a word that evokes images of precariously stacked tomes one good breeze away from toppling over." Full article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/theres-a-japanese-word-for-people-who-buy-more-books-than-they-can-actually-read_n_58f79b7ae4b029063d364226

I say in this day and age, we have a new problem. E books. Gosh you can download a book and never remember it is there. I tried to make various lists of all the books I have; handwritten lists, excel spreadsheets, by category - hard copy, Kindle, Nook, PDF, but I had to give that up pretty quick. One positive I saw of having lots of books is a predictor of "reading performance" and shows that a person has lots of interests in lots of different things. For me, I just like books. With hard cover and paper backs, I like the look of all the different covers and sizes. I like seeing my list of e book; the titles and the cover pictures. So many to choose from depending on my mood. As Lemony Snicket once said (Yes I read all of those books, and thought they were funny.) : "It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read."