Tsundoku

Today’s entry is one that will hopefully have all book lovers nodding quietly and smiling to themselves. However, I will get there the long way round.

Part of what makes a linguist tick is the kind of thing that makes other people think ‘well, if you say so…’ or ‘and how does that help?’ or else utter an unimpressed ‘wow’. However, it will come as no surprise that I don’t agree with these people. Linguistics are the science of trying to understand how the human mind works at its most basic level: how to exchange information in the most efficient way. I don’t need to explain how all the languages in the world each convey information in a different, but completely effective, way. What is fascinating, though, is how some cultures decided to assign importance to some elements that other cultures overlooked or simply did not need (no desert-based civilisation needs many terms for ‘snow’, for instance). Sometimes there are terms that fall through the cracks of one-on-one equivalence.

For instance, as a Spanish speaker, I find the word sobremesa to be perfectly natural: it’s the time after lunch when you’re just chatting with the other people round the table, maybe over coffee or a shot of something, possibly without even tidying up the dishes because you’re all just so comfortable that you don’t want to ruin the moment. However, I haven’t found that concept exactly in any other language without the need to resort to a longer expression or a roundabout explanation.

There are other such words in other languages, such as tartle in Scottish English, which means ‘to hesitate when introducing someone because you’ve forgotten that person’s name’, or cafuné in Brazilian Portuguese, which means ‘to lovingly run your fingers through someone’s hair or to massage their head’. The list is endless! As a linguist, it’s beyond me how people can’t find this fascinating. ‘Yeah, well… OK, I guess…’, I hear most people say.

Personally, I find the slipped-through-the-gaps words from Japanese to be the nicest because everything in their culture seems to be delicate and carefully thought out. My all‑time favourite is tsundoku (積ん読. I must trust Wikipedia with this spelling!), which means ‘the act of accumulating books for reading at a later stage’.

Book lovers, I can see you! You’re starting to smile to yourselves! You know where this is going!

As a book lover myself, one of my greatest joys is walking into bookshops. I could even walk into one in Indonesia and feel great, even if I speak not a single word of Indonesian. Librebook, in Brussels, is one of my favourite spots in the city. I will stop at second-hand bookshops even if I’ve got urgent things to do. On a recent trip abroad I made sure to walk my family through the points of a city where I knew there were several bookshops. It follows naturally that I can’t help myself and I usually end up buying stuff, and said stuff gets piled up until a moment when I hope I’ll have time to read it. I don’t know the scientific explanation for this, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fact of anticipating the time when those books will be enjoyed. They are a reminder of the promise of good things.

Tsundoku can sometimes get stressful, because I get anxious at having to devote too much time to cleaning-cooking-shopping-working instead of to escaping into the pile of books, but despite that I embrace it. I have plenty of negative traits, but tsundoku is one that I refuse to consider a fault. Let’s enjoy the anxiety that comes with looking forward to a time when we’ll be sitting down in the best possible company that a book lover can find.