There's a Word for My Affliction

For anyone who has read more than one or two of my posts, you know that I am an avid reader.

Avid reader is actually a gross understatement.

I read a lot, nearly anything that I can get my hands on and about a hundred blog posts or articles per week from every direction.  Articles from my Twitter or LinkedIn feed, newsletters and trade publications sent to me at work, articles in my Yahoo! feed, numerous magazines that I subscribe to in print and online, newsletters sent to me from T. Rowe Price, Vanguard and other investment houses.  And lots of books.  Lots and lots of books.

My blog could just have easily been a book review forum or focusing on things that I have read.  

There is still a distinct possibility that my future hustle will revolve around reviewing books or writing things that I like about them or what I have learned for them.  For pay, of course.

As a matter of fact, should you want me to read a book or article that you have read, and then do a nice 1,000 or so word summary of my own, for pay of course, I would be happy to.  You could be my first customer.

Anyway, by the time you have reached my Prime Age of forty-seven, nearly forty-eight, you should well know your own strengths and weaknesses.

Something that others could perceive as a character flaw in me, but I prefer to view as a flaw in myself by not earning enough money, is my steady accumulation of books and other reading materials.

Those who live with me and a few others who know me well may view it as a character flaw because every spare foot of our home, my car and my office is filled with books.

One of many piles in our bedroom.

If I stop at a used book sale or Half Price Books telling myself “I am just going to browse,” I know even while saying that that I may fall off the book wagon again.  I have just browsed a few times, not finding anything to my liking.  More often, I find myself walking out with five or more books, wondering where I can stash them and thinking of perhaps selling them on eBay once I have read them.

Another bedroom pile of books.

By doing this about a hundred times, I have wound up with more books than I will likely ever read.

Four bins filled with books in our garage.

But I am not only like this with books.

A few years ago, I thought it a great bargain to subscribe to many magazines, many of which would send me “great deals” to subscribe for only ten bucks per year.  I was on the A-#1 sucker list for magazine subscriptions.

I have subscribed to both Money magazine and Kiplinger’s for over twenty years, but I have added many more over the past few years.  Subscribing to both the Atlantic and the New Yorker for years labeled me as a liberal, and a wealthy one at that.  Subscribing to Inc and Fortune must have labeled me as interested in high-tech business.  Subscribing to Real Simple, Better Housekeeping and Better Homes & Gardens (ostensibly for my wife but really for me) for years must have labeled us as proud homeowners.  I subscribed to Architectural Digest for a few years, but got sick of reading about people who spend twice as much on landscaping their second homes as we do on our primary residence.

Just a few of my saved magazines are Money and The New Yorker

Over the years, I have come across so many articles that have piqued my interest and would make great blog posts that I am very guilty of having let them pile up.

On my computer, I now have over 2,000 articles that I have saved, also with the intention of writing something about them.  It may be about how to better organize your finances, the challenges of paying for college, or the pros and cons of collecting social security at the age of sixty-two.

Whatever the case may be with those, I rarely actually refer back to a saved article on my computer but at least they do not take up the massive amount of physical space that the books do.  They just take up memory space on our computer.

I have printed out several hundred of these articles, having punched holes in them, and they reside in several three-ring binders in our closet waiting for me to take them out and write something based upon them.

Most of these binders are filled with articles that I have printed.

A good project for me for the entirety of next year would be to write posts based on the contents of one or perhaps two of these binders.

So here I admit to being afflicted by something that I have read several articles about this summer and that I thought of as merely having hoarding tendencies when it comes to books, magazines and printed out articles and blog posts.

Tsundoku.

I first came across this word a few months ago in an article in the Chicago Tribune, the only newspaper that we currently subscribe to.

Warner’s article, and several others that I read on the topic, refer to tsundoku as pertaining to books.

However, the definition as described on Wikipedia is broader than just books:  Japanese:(積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.

So now you know.

In my previous primary blogging existence as the MiddleClass Guy, a socioeconomic status that I am squarely in the middle of, I shared my Resolutions for this year.  One of them was to net-minus one hundred books.  Realizing that I might purchase a hundred more, it was my intention to part with two hundred if I did so, netting one hundred less by January 1^st than I started the year with.

Well, the good news is that there is no way that I will have purchased an additional two hundred books throughout this year.  If I had to swear on the Torah in a court of law, I would estimate the number of books that I have purchased so far this year at about fifty.  It could be forty or it could be sixty, but I would be comfortable ball parking it at fifty.  About six per month.

The problem is that I have only parted with about twenty, and that was in one major donation to the Salvation Army early this year.

I recall one day when I felt guilty leaving a library book sale with about eight books, knowing that it was blowing my chances to achieve that Resolution.

But I did learn one valuable lesson from that – I will never make that Resolution again.  I cannot achieve it.

I have previously written and will write now and will again in the future that if I was a multimillionaire, nobody would question my book accumulation.  I would simply have a large library room in our home where I would sit at night by a fireplace, sipping a fine vintage and reading one of the numerous books that I have purchased.  I might have to climb a ladder to get the one that I wanted to read, but nobody would question it.    

Nobody would say that I suffer from what I obviously do.

Sonduko.