I get a lot out of the library. It's a great place to work or study. It's both devoid of and filled with distraction. (I also had a bedroom converted to an office... which, except for the girlfriend's sewing table, is almost exclusively used for PC gaming...) Having all those unread books around means I'm never bored, and I'm always subtly being pushed to learn the things I want to learn.
The Japanese wikipedia version of this article is also a stub, and there's only 550K results in Japanese google, which is pretty much identical to the amount if you search "Tsundoku" in English. If you search for the phrase in hiragana only, the results become even less at 75K.
> Bibliomania (tsundoku)
There very clearly is a word for it. Bibliomania.
Also the credits expire, even when you are signed up.
(Also, as far as physical books, you should see my basement... Buying technical books was a business expense when I was self-employed).
Thanks for the inspiration. I've been putting this off because i didn't have a solution, but just pulled the trigger.
I've been getting back into making music so I wanted to spend it on something fun related to that. And this triggered a surprisingly intense amount of anxiety where I found it really hard to decide what to get. After a lot of soul searching, the understanding I reached was:
There are two flavors of happiness I'll call "joy" and "satisfaction". Joy is stuff where the act itself is intrinsically pleasurable. Taking a warm bath, eating a good dessert, a conversation with close friends. Pleasures to the senses that require no effort on your part. Satisfaction is stuff where having done the act feels good. Writing a short story. Cleaning the garage. You only get out of it what you put into it. If you've heard of "type 1 fun" and "type 2 fun", it's that same distinction. In practice, most hobbies blend the two.
There's a sort of third in-between category for activities whose joy/satisfaction ratio is skill dependent. Sitting down at a piano when you don't how to play well is almost pure satisfaction. It's uncomfortable and repetitive. It doesn't sound great. Your fingers hurt. But you feel good about making progress practicing the skill. Sitting down to play piano when you have mastered it is very enjoyable. You get to perform and it feels good seeing your body create the delightful sounds you hear in your head.
My experience is that the hobbies where people acquire the stuff but then don't use it are the ones that weight more towards satisfaction than joy, and in especially the ones that are skill-dependent. YouTube makes the latter particularly failure prone because there are infinite videos of people who have mastered skills that make the hobby look like pure joy.
(For me, the realization was that since I wanted to maximize joy, I should get gear that built on my existing music skills instead of requiring me to learn more to get fun out of it. I got a little MIDI keyboard and a looper pedal since I already know how to make music on a computer and play a little guitar and those make that existing skill more rewarding.)
Made particularly easy thanks to the Humble Bundle. Probably half of my Steam collection consists of games I got from bundles I bought just to get a particular title, and I didn't have anyone to give the rest of the Steam keys to.
One of the best things my mother ever did for me was always have a ton of books around. Fiction, non-fiction. Garbage. Masterpieces. Even the ones I wasn't allowed to read "until I was older." I also had a grandmother that worked at a bookstore for most of her life. I have, and love, a Kindle, but I can't imagine a life without books.
You never know where reading will take you next.
The reasoning is that I'd rather have a choice when picking up the next book, rather than just having to read the last one I bought; as you say, you never know where reading will take you next. Often, reading a book on a subject makes me want to check out a few of the works referenced, and before you know it, the TBR pile has increased in size...
He never had and likely never will read any of them, it was primarily an attempt to buy social favor with guests. He'd just say he had a poor memory for books he read long ago whenever someone tried discussing them at a house party.
It was unnerving how effective this was.
“Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t own any books” used to be somewhat common dating advice. With e-readers, it’s not as applicable, but the principle is still good.
