{"id":36063,"date":"2018-07-30T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36063"},"modified":"2018-07-10T08:04:57","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T12:04:57","slug":"qotd-buying-books-but-not-reading-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/30\/qotd-buying-books-but-not-reading-them\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Buying books but not reading them"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Nick Carraway slinks away from Jay Gatsby\u2019s party. In the library he comes across a drunken, bespectacled fat cat who starts going off about the books lining the walls. \u201cThey\u2019re real,\u201d he slurs, pointing to them. \u201cWhat thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too \u2014 didn\u2019t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?\u201d Uncut pages! If you know how books used to be manufactured, this means one thing and one thing only: Gatsby wasn\u2019t much of a reader. After all, until they\u2019re cut, book pages can\u2019t be turned.<\/p>\n<p>Collecting books and not reading them is, shall we say, textbook behavior. At least for some of you, and you know who you are. Suffering from the condition of racking up book purchases of $100, $200 or $1,000 without ever bending a spine? There\u2019s a Japanese word for you.<\/p>\n<p>Prognosis: terminal. Stats reveal that e-reading doesn\u2019t hold a candle to the joy of reading a physical book. Although e-book sales jumped 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, 2.71 billion physical books were sold in the U.S. alone in 2015, according to Statista. That\u2019s compared with the 1.32 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada. As if every American were reading an average of more than eight books annually.<\/p>\n<p>Certainly, it\u2019s unlikely you\u2019re going to hear the word <em>tsundoku<\/em> on the subway. But in a language where there are words for canceling an appointment at the last minute and the culture-specific condition of adult male shut-in syndrome, how can you be surprised? Other, similar words like <em>ts\u016bdoku<\/em> (read through) and <em>jukudoku<\/em> (reading deeply) are in praise of sitting down with a book (<em>doku<\/em> means \u201cto read\u201d). But we think <em>tsundoku<\/em> is particularly special: <em>Oku<\/em> means to do something and leave it for a while, says Sahoko Ichikawa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University, and <em>tsunde<\/em> means to stack things. <\/p>\n<p>Libby Coleman, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozy.com\/acumen\/theres-a-word-for-buying-books-and-not-reading-them\/71898\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;There\u2019s a Word for Buying Books and Not Reading Them&#8221;, <em>OZY<\/em><\/a>, 2016-10-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nick Carraway slinks away from Jay Gatsby\u2019s party. In the library he comes across a drunken, bespectacled fat cat who starts going off about the books lining the walls. \u201cThey\u2019re real,\u201d he slurs, pointing to them. \u201cWhat thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too \u2014 didn\u2019t cut the pages. But what do you want? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,24,41],"tags":[400,139],"class_list":["post-36063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-japan","category-quotations","tag-language","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9nF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36064,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36063\/revisions\/36064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}