--Kevin Mims, NYT Book Review
My nephew Denny dropped by my house during the summer. He's a high school English teacher, temporarily teaching sixth grade in Thailand where his daughter attends school. He and his daughter were back in the States to receive the adoration of adoring relatives.
Naturally, his attention was drawn to my bookcases. He had lived with me for a year or two, long ago, as a student, so he was hardly surprised that I had a lot of books. But now, as a professional, he eyed the titles with a trained eye. He kept asking me, with a gleam in his eye, "Well, have you read this one?"
I all too frequently admitted that I had not yet read it, but was saving it to read in my old age. Denny and his mother glanced meaningfully at each other.
I was pleased to read Mr. Mims's essay in this morning's New York Times, an essay devoted to the proposition that a bookcase full of unread books "isn't a sign of failure or ignorance, [but rather] a badge of honor." A book collection, Mims continues, is a representation of a person's mind. When you stop buying new books, it indicates that you have become satisfied that anything you don't know now isn't worth knowing. It suggests a person so old that he couldn't care less about further intellectual growth.
Over a life time, I've bought a large number of books -- perhaps not the three thousand that Mims claims for himself, but many. I've also belonged to a British "fine edition" club which has tempted me for the past 38 years to buy regularly beautifully bound books at reasonable prices -- classics, histories, obscure travel writings, and even more obscure diaries by eighteenth and nineteenth century English country folk discussing the progress of their gardens and the despicable behavior of their neighbors down the road.
Many of these books I've read in their entirety, I hasten to assure you. Some I've read in part -- either because they're the sort of book you only expect to read parts of, or because works such as Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Churchill's biography of his ancestor Marlborough, Macauley's History of England, and Hume's "ditto," are all beautifully bound sets and well worth dabbling in but -- a big "but" -- life is short and these multi-volume sets are long.
And then there are the many books that one starts in on -- for example, anything by Thackeray -- and finally decides with disappointment that he just isn't that sort of reader. Nope, not a Thackeray kind of guy.
But finally, there is a large group of books that you bought with enthusiasm, fully intend to read, but just haven't got around to yet. Some of these I've actually read, long after their purchase, and reviewed in this blog. Mims also points to this kind of book, and notes that the Japanese have a word for it -- tsundoku, meaning a stack of books you've bought but haven't yet read. I love the word, and would use it often if I knew how to pronounce it. For years I've had a tsundoku piled on a table in my living room, the titles occasionally changing. But slowly.
Mims concludes his essay with the smug observation that,
The sight of a book you haven't read can remind you that there are many things you've yet to learn. And the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.
Smug or not, I fully agree.
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