When I first arrived at the local Rotary Book Fair, I felt the giddy thrill usually reserved for Millennials going to a bespoke plant nursery on payday.
Like houseplants, books are generally considered non-essential items, but no one would accuse someone of “hoarding plants”.
I wandered down the long tables packed with an endless horizon of titles, organised neatly into categories: fiction, business, biography, James Patterson. My eyes would land on a book I’ve read and loved, and I’d be filled with the warmth of recognising an old friend, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Should I rescue it?
I started filling a large bag with books from authors I enjoy, or titles I could vaguely recall were recommended by a snooty literary blog. I grabbed Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, ironically, given that my heaving bookshelves would not be able to accommodate this incoming load.
One year, I posted a photo of my Rotary Book Fair haul, the titles stacked on top of each other, with the caption: “Nothing better than foraging for a haul of books I’ll never read.”
Two years on, they remain unread.
I lugged my eclectic pile home; a set of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, aWomen’s Weekly ultimate birthday cake book, a Leunig collection, Mr Bean’s Diary, as well as a smattering of fiction, and put them on the bedroom floor, suspecting that would be their permanent home. My husband recently mentioned building “another bookshelf” in the spare room, which I told him was the sexiest thing he’s ever said.
There’s a Japanese word for the phenomenon of letting books pile up without reading them: tsundoku – a neat package of an idea: tsunde-oke, meaning “letting things pile up”, and dokusho, meaning “reading books”. In English, the phenomenon is called “bibliomania”.
My grandma’s sister, a linguistics professor, fluent in Anglo-Saxon, had an actual library in her house; snaking floor to ceiling shelves, flanked by a ladder on wheels. I loved to sit there and read. It was a sacred space, almost religious in its reverence to knowledge.
But like addiction psychology dictates, “it’s only a problem if it causes problems”, at least in my interpretation. There are so many reasons why I hoard books, which I feel the need to defend, or explain, should the crew of Hoarders ever come location-scouting.
Marie Kondo’s much lampooned rule of thumb – if something doesn’t bring you joy, chuck it out – cannot possibly be applied to books, except maybe that James Patterson collection.
As an emerging English teacher, I’m dismayed by teens’ attitudes to reading; assigning them a whole book to read for class feels like an archaic torture: death by boredom. But they’re just showing symptoms of what we’re all going through, a mass brain rewiring where our attention spans are contracting to the length of a TikTok reel.
One study has shown that kids who grow up in houses with between 80 and 350 books have “improved literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology skills as adults” which should put my kids on track for the Ivy League by the time they’re 13 (a brief survey of my bookshelves/floors puts their numbers at about 500).
Unread books wait quietly to be pulled out and given to a friend, or referenced when a Google inquiry yields an overwhelming number of pages, until you remember you do have a book on 1980s Japanese stationery design somewhere. But more than anything else, unread books represent the electric promise of knowledge or stories yet to be known.
They keep us humble because there will never be enough time to learn deeply about the world. The internet cannot yield this knowledge, designed as it is to keep your attention bouncing around like a ping pong ball.
Book hoarding needs a rebranding, something like tsundoku which has positive connotations. My suggestion? “Intellectual gardening”. You’re cultivating all the potential knowledge that will make your life flourish, like filling a house with plants.
So if the producers of Hoarders do rock up on my doorstep, I’ll tell them I’m not hoarding books, I’m just waiting for my husband to build my dream library “greenhouse”. But they can take James Patterson if they like.
