I only have the word of the internet to tell me that Tsundoku is the condition of acquiring new books without reading them. My metric for this condition is my list of books I own but have yet to read:
- the last three parts of Christopher Tolkien’s Histories of Middle-Earth
- Strategic Information Management: Challenges and Strategies in Managing Information Systems
- Hume’s Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding
- Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962-1154
- England in the Later Middle Ages
- Bertrand Russel’s Problems with Philosophy
- John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism and On Liberty (two copies, different editions, because I buy and read books at different rates)
- A Song of Stone by Iain Banks
- Digital Typography by Knuth
- Merchant and Craft Guilds: A History of the Aberdeen Incorporated Trades
- The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus
- Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
And those are only the ones I want to read and own (and I think that list is incomplete – I bought a book on online communities a few weeks ago and currently can’t find it). Never mind the ones I don’t own.
And this is only about books. What about those side projects, businesses, hobbies, blog posts and other interests I “would do if I got around to it” and never do? Thinking clearly about what to do next and keeping expectations consistent with what I can do is an important skill, and one I seem to lack.
