Tsundoku

It is a scene familiar to many of us. A precarious stack of books on the nightstand, a silent testament to our ambitions and our limitations. In one home, this tower, 41 volumes high, with an overflow pile of 23, topples in the night, the sudden crash mistaken for an earthquake, a seismic event of literary overload. In another, the piles are a source of comfort, a fortress of paper and ink. As the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once said, "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books".
This is the landscape of the modern reader: a terrain of teetering stacks, overflowing shelves, and the dual, conflicting emotions they inspire. On one hand, there is a quiet guilt. An unread book on the shelf can feel like a "trophy of failure, " a promise made to oneself and left unfulfilled. On the other hand, there is an undeniable, almost spiritual ecstasy. The American author A. Edward Newton, a collector of 10, 000 books, captured this feeling perfectly: "Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity".