The Japanese language, much like German, can always be relied on to provide us with single words for concepts which we can only manage to capture in English with a full sentence. Anyone who’s remotely bookish will be well acquainted with the term tsundoku, a double-duty word both for the act of buying books and letting them build up in an unread pile, as well as for the physical pile itself.
The flat Gareth and I currently live in is so small that it doesn’t even have room for the luxury of floor space where tsundoku piles could form. Instead, we’re the sort of people who have to slot books on their sides wherever we can, into those gaps between the top of a row of upright volumes and the next shelf above them. I hate it; it looks ugly and feels disrespectful to the books, as if we were dry stone walling with them in the clumsiest and most amateurish fashion.
Reading a book from this zone liberates it for a short while, but doesn’t solve the problem of where to put it again after I’ve finished it. Only a bigger home and more bookcases will do the trick. Fingers crossed, this will be the year when that happens.
As I mentioned in my end-of-2025 post, I’m halfway through J G Ballard’s Kingdom Come (which I’m enjoying, even if it’s a bit sobering). It’s my current in-bed, pre-bed reading, and I reckon I will be finished with it by the end of January, so I’m using this post to prompt me to think about what else is sitting on the shelves at home, silently pleading to be paroled for a while from horizontal hell.
My 2025 Christmas present books haven’t even found a shelf to be stuffed onto yet, and are still in a crate in the space where one of our two Christmas trees stood a week ago. I asked Santa for Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and Gareth went and got me not just that but the other three novels in the Southern Reach series as well: Authority, Acceptance and Absolution, in beautiful 10th anniversary editions. I’d like to spread them out across the year; I suspect taking them all on back-to-back would be rather overwhelming. But having said that, they might hook me so much that I just want to keep pushing further and further into Area X without stopping. We’ll see.
Santa (Gareth) also got me Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation and I started that over Twixtmas and will make sure to finish that by the end of the month, too. I’m hoping Murakami will eventually get round to talking about some actual writing at some point; so far, it’s been mostly him talking about how his career has hinged on a lot of luck and some arbitrary moments of decision to just write a novel, which is fine, but doesn’t really help me in any useful way. Maybe this is the secret point, though: there is no magic formula — the point is just to get on and write the things you want to write.
On the shelf from Christmas 2024, I’ve still got The Atlas of Unusual Languages and The Atlas of Unusual Borders, both by Zoran Nikolić, which aren’t just there to satisfy my love of languages and maps, but are intended as serious useful research to support the next draft of Obsolete Constellations that I’m intending to get stuck into in May. Likewise, I need to read Julian Baggini’s Atheism: A Very Short Introduction and David Ford’s Theology: A Very Short Introduction for much the same reason.
There’s loads more competing for my attention, now I come to think about it — Hattie Crisell’s In Writing; John Wyndham’s The Outward Urge; Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People; Edward Parnell’s Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country… Loads and loads more besides. And then there’s something that’s not even technically part of my own tsundoku pile, something I gifted to Gareth for his birthday last year: Books Do Furnish A Room — not the Anthony Trollope novel, but Leslie Geddes-Brown’s coffee-table interior design porno about the best way to show off the books you’ve got in your home.
Actually, maybe I should let that one jump the queue… At the very least, all those books languishing on their sides on the BILLY bookcases would definitely thank me for it.
Whatever you’re reading at the start of 2026, whatever books find their way onto your shelves and onto your tsundoku stacks this year, I wish you joy in discovering some new friends and in reconnecting with some old ones. Don’t send me your recommendations, though. I’ve got more than enough to get on with as it is.
