Shelving the idea of reading some books
The HinduThe German language does it best – giving us single words that can be translated only into longish English sentences. Literally “storm free’, it means something like “When your parents are away, and you have the whole house to yourself.” Or, a personal favourite, Backpfeifengesicht, which means, “A face that begs to be slapped.” Such useful words to work into a conversation. A couple of days after that session at Bengaluru’s Bookworm store, I looked for a German word that translated into a version of “the art of buying books and never reading them. “Unread books are much more valuable than read ones,” wrote Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese-American essayist, who called the unread collection the ‘anti-library’. Someone pointed out a key difference: while bibliomania is the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku is the intention to read books – collecting them is a by-product.
History of this topic
WHITE SPACE | The Art of Hoarding Books and Not Reading Them
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