Library of unread books? - There's a name for that.

[UTUSN]

**************QUOTE*********

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/buy-books-never-read-them-110017166.html

Buy Books And Never Read Them? There's A Japanese Term For That.

.... What is tsundoku? ....

“Tsundoku today is used as a noun meaning the habit or state of piling up books with the intention ― sometimes fulfilled, sometimes not ― of reading them later,” said Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, a linguist specializing in historical and Japanese linguistics and assistant teaching professor of Japanese studies at Carnegie Mellon University. “The term originates from the verb phrase tsunde-oku (積んでおく ) , literally ‘to pile something up and leave it there.’”

“When I read Japanese blogs and social media, I do see tsundoku used in positive, neutral, and negative contexts,” Fujinaga-Gordon said. “There are cases where it conveys mild shame or guilt, and others where it’s used humorously or even proudly as a sign of intellectual curiosity.” ....

Outside Japan, the term tsundoku has resonated with readers who see their book piles not as failures but as potential ― a concept echoed by Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. He famously kept a vast library with tens of thousands of books, mostly unread, and coined the term “anti[-]library,” which was later popularized by essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The underlying idea is that a collection of unread books can show curiosity, humility and ambition in the face of knowledge. It’s a monument not to what you already know, but to the infinite things you don’t. ....

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[Ocelot II]

1. Oh, that does sound familiar.

[ms liberty]

2. Yea, I currently have 14 books on my end table, which is my "first drop point" lol

When I was dusting earlier, I talked to myself about a book buying moratorium until after we clear my MiL's house. She had a lot of books and I know there are some I will want because we gave them to her!

[UTUSN]

3. In addition to the above, I have another category - books that I read when I was too young, lacked

the life experience to appreciate them, and now am too long in the tooth to go back. Luckily, there is now YouTube, which is a veritable university on all sorts of topics, much more immediate in video form, as in-depth or brief as can be, and available to all schedules.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. YouTube is increasingly flooded with AI slop. I would be very very careful about accepting anything there as factual.

Many of the fakes are pathetically obvious, but that can lull you into thinking you can always spot the fakes. You can't. It doesn't matter who you are, or how smart you are, you're going to fall for something that you can't possibly verify but that looks soooooo convincing you can't make yourself feel skeptical about it.

[UTUSN]

5. You said it. Even before that, if I mentioned "the internet" I would run into people who would

react automatically dismissively, saying that "the internet" was totally full of brainwashing crap, and I would have to be defensive about how I am a critical thinker, not believing anything and everything. Same as how wingnuts who themselves are brainwashed by Faux and the MAGA cult claim that everybody who disagrees is brainwashed the other way and are hades-bent on banning books, passing laws dictating school curricula, and dare I say as how very much here at DU there is a strain of thought that our minds can be polluted if we read or view some things.

That said, your post is breathtakingly insightful and accurate. Along with my defense about being a critical thinker, able to tell the difference of things in the internet, I, only in recent months, caught on to some of the YouTubes I had sampled heavily (some exposes of Hollywood double lives) that they were sensationalized and clickbaited, "pathetically obvious" as you say. So those are also easy to drop, including some podcasts that are ostensibly on "our side". And most of my other stuff (and YouTube has replaced *EVERYTHING* for me, almost all network and cable fare). And, I still fall into some AI stuff here and there, but, besides priding myself about being to tell the difference, I usually eventually catch on, but more than that, I'm generally skeptical/critical/unbelieving, about to the point of nihilism.

[bif]

6. Guilty!

I literally have hundreds upon hundreds of books I haven't read and know, deep down, that I never will read.

[UTUSN]

7. You're acquited!

[Hekate]

8. That's me all over. I want a calligraphy print of the word in Japanese brushwork...

But when I went looking online all I found were fairly soppy motivational posters in English.

I ran across a YouTube video that was kind of neat, but the listeners’ comments tended to be jarringly judgmental — and in this world, I see enough of that. I am a bibliophile, in a world where public libraries are in danger of withering away.

I love this: The underlying idea is that a collection of unread books can show curiosity, humility and ambition in the face of knowledge. It’s a monument not to what you already know, but to the infinite things you don’t. ....