On Not Reading
If you only read one book this year… that’s still more than 1 in 4 people
Not everyone likes books. About a quarter of Americans, Brits and Australians say that they have not read a book recently.
Whereas other people like books too much. Tsundoku (積ん読) is a Japanese word meaning “to pile up books around your house without reading them”. As this BBC article notes:
"The phrase 'tsundoku sensei' appears in text from 1879 according to the writer Mori Senzo," Prof Gerstle explained. "Which is likely to be satirical, about a teacher who has lots of books but doesn't read them."
While this might sound like tsundoku is being used as an insult, Prof Gerstle said the word does not carry any stigma in Japan.
N.B. I do not think it is a coincidence that Marie Kondo is Japanese.
For the first 35 years of my life I moved around frequently, sometimes from abode to abode, sometimes from town to town, sometimes from continent to continent. I took few books with me. Then at around the same time, firstly I bought an apartment and then also got some sessional work at a university. The apartment was soon full of a wife and a child. There was no room for books. Where there was room for books was the university library. I discovered that they were quite willing to obtain a book for me if they didn’t have it already. I confess that I did not read everything they ordered on my behalf - so perhaps I had outsourced my tsundoku.
I now live in a house and no longer have access to the university library. But old habits die hard with a vengeance and I am fairly frugal with my book buying habits. I only buy physical books if I cannot obtain them electronically and I try to read all the books I buy. Unless they are really boring. Or just long. Authors absolutely should not underestimate the attractiveness of a short book and absolutely should underestimate the patience of their readers. Is what you have to say really that interesting?
The historically physical nature of books makes their presence visible. You can walk into someone’s house and see the books. In some cases, the books are battered and annotated and covered with fluorescent book marks (which presumably allow the nocturnal bookworm to find that key reference late at night with the lights out). In some cases, the books have not been touched in years. Either way, you can judge them on their library. There should be a Japanese word for “judging someone on the contents of their bookshelves”.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - investor, writer, philosopher, dickhead-on-social-media(1)(2) - riffed on the world of unread books with “the anti-library”. This is a collection of books that you own but haven’t read that should be a source of intellectual humility. Now that just sounds like a regular library to me. And if an anti-library is supposed to produce intellectual humility then Nassim Knickers-in-a-Twist plainly doesn’t own one.
ebooks offer no such physical reference point. However they should provide a great deal more data. Amazon presumably know a lot about my reading habits(3). And they know heaps about what everyone using the Kindle have or haven’t looked at or annotated. However I am not aware of any of this data either being feed back to authors or readers in any actionable way. Netflix use viewer data to try to “optimize”(4) their own shows but they have been notoriously shy at releasing any kind of viewer data publicly. Amazon are even more secretive.
Some data does leak out of the Bezosmachine (and not just the occasional incriminating dick pic). Jordan Ellenberg created a semi-serious measure of book completion called “The Hawking Index”.
Take the 5 most popular “Popular Highlights”.
Identify the % through the book that each Highlight is.
Average these to give an aggregate score.
A book with the Highlights evenly distributed should come out at around 50%. Obviously this approach has a ton of conceptual problems (e.g. what if the more quotable parts of the book are earlier on?). But given the paucity of data, it’s not a bad start.
How does it pan out in practice when Ellenberg first published this in 2014?
YA high school non-fiction book “Catching Fire” gets a respectable 43.4%.
Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History Of Time” gets an insomnia-curing 6.4%.
Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” gets a baffling 98.5%, implying either its readership had started at the back or that Tartt’s prose takes a while to get going. Fun Fact: “The Goldfinch” is apparently one of the most common unfinished books according to Good Reads.
This naturally led me to perform a similar analysis of some of the better known books sitting in my Kindle app.
There’s a lot going on in these numbers. The impact of genre and book length and publication time duration on book annotation.
Perhaps there is too much going on. In our efforts to quantify everything, will we destroy the wellsprings of art and human creativity? Maybe. If we are lucky.
I’ll let you all draw your own conclusions.
(1) More phrases requiring words. Which language will step up this time? Come on, German, stop wallowing in your Schadenfreude and get on the case.
(2) Also, I am one of the many thousands of people to be blocked by NNT on the Twitters. I think I took the piss out of him for being mean about interns but it was a while ago, we’ve all moved on, and it’s hard to narrow it down to a particular obnoxious post of his. He sure can dish it out. But he can’t take it. Ridicule is a one way street for NNT. Which is a shame coz some of his stuff is quite good.
(3) Which is definitely not as blackmailable as my Google history.
(4) “Optimize” is this context means “get more people to subscribe” and “get fewer people to unsubscribe” or, to put it another way, to create mountains of mediocre TV.
Oooo, thanks for sharing ‘tsundoku’. That is def me, for non-fiction. Fiction I manage to get through.