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Journalism of Courage
If your nightstand TBR (To Be Read) pile has become a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa made of unopened novels and “must-read” nonfiction, you are not failing as a reader. You may just be practicing tsundoku, a Japanese word for buying books and letting them pile up unread.
The term dates back to at least 1879, when it was used to describe a teacher who owned more books than he actually read. While the word carries a wink of satire, it is not a mark of shame. Instead, it captures a nearly universal tension: our ambitions run faster than our schedules.
The late Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco knew the feeling well. His private library contained more than 50,000 volumes. Asked why, he explained: “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticise those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.”
For Eco, unread books were not evidence of failure but a form of preparedness. He compared them to medicine: “If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment.”
The statistician and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb pushed this further in The Black Swan. He coined the idea of the antilibrary: “The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
Unread shelves, in other words, are not dead weight. They remind us of our ignorance, which Taleb argues is more valuable than the knowledge we’ve already stored.
But in today’s marketing-saturated culture, tsundoku has taken on a second life. Books have always signaled status, but never more so than in the age of Instagram, Goodreads, and Zoom backdrops. Publishers market not just words but covers, readers curate their shelves as much for the feed as for the mind.
The act of buying and displaying books, sometimes more than reading them, has become a form of what sociologists call “cultural capital.” Owning the latest prizewinner or stacking glossy art books on the coffee table is as much about signaling curiosity as satisfying it.
Eco dismissed this “consumer mentality,” noting that “those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.” Yet in a marketplace where literacy itself is branded, unread books can slide into props—part of the performance of intellect.
This isn’t new. Owning books has long been a performance of seriousness. But digital culture has turbocharged it. Hashtags like #shelfie and apps that track your annual page counts gamify reading itself. Tsundoku becomes not only private guilt but public theater: the pile by your bed stands in for your aspirational self.
In this sense, tsundoku straddles two worlds. On one hand, it is a humble acknowledgment of the unknown. On the other, it risks being an Instagrammable backdrop, a way to show that you’re keeping up, even if your bookmark barely moves.
Kevin Mims, writing in The New York Times, reminds us that not all books fit neatly into the categories of “read” and “unread”: “Every book lover knows there is a third category that falls somewhere between the other two: the partially read book.”
Read books are trophies of what we’ve learned. Unread books, Eco and Taleb argue, are reminders of what we don’t. Partially read ones represent the messy middle—the way knowledge actually lives in fits and starts, rather than in completed checklists.
The sight of spines we haven’t opened can feel accusatory, but reframed they are reminders of curiosity. As Taleb notes, “the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.”
Tsundoku is therefore not just about hoarding or signaling. It is about leaving room for possibility. A stack of unread books means you are still reaching. Yes, it can become performative. But it can also be protective, an intellectual insurance, if you will, against a future you cannot predict.
So the next time someone glances at your overflowing shelves and asks if you have read them all, stamp down your guily. Smile, and quote Eco: “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy.”
