In Japan, there’s a charming word for a habit many readers secretly share: Tsundoku. It describes the act of buying or collecting books and letting them pile up unread. At first it may sound like waste or neglect, but in Japanese culture, Tsundoku carries no shame. Instead, it celebrates the love of learning and the endless possibility that books represent.
The word itself is centuries old. “Tsun” means to stack things up, and “doku” means to read. Put together, Tsundoku captures the picture of books waiting patiently on shelves, desks, or bedside tables. These stacks are not failures — they are promises, silent reminders of knowledge and stories yet to be discovered.
Writers and thinkers have long defended the value of unread books. Italian philosopher Umberto Eco famously kept a personal library of more than 30,000 volumes, most of them unread. For him, the unread books were more important than the finished ones, because they pointed to everything he still didn’t know. Nassim Nicholas Taleb later called this the antilibrary in his book The Black Swan — a library of potential, not just of achievement.
In everyday life, many of us practise Tsundoku without realising it. A cookbook you haven’t tried, a novel still in its wrapper, or a textbook waiting for attention — each represents curiosity rather than neglect. Even unread, books shape us by being present, sparking interest every time our eyes fall on them.