Why Introverts Buy Books They Will Never Read
Video from Little Things Deeply
Why Introverts Buy Books They Will Never Read
"There is a woman standing in a small bookstore on a Saturday afternoon.
She is holding three books. One of them she already owns — it is sitting
on a shelf at home, unread, bought eleven months ago in a different
bookstore in a different city, and forgotten. She has forty-seven other
unread books on shelves throughout her apartment. There is a stack beside
her bed so old it has its own dust line on the wallpaper behind it.
She knows all of this. Precisely.
She is going to buy all three anyway.
If you have ever stood at a register with a stack of books, feeling that
small, complicated braid of guilt and hope and quiet defiance — this
video is for you.
This is not a story about procrastination, or wasting money, or failing
to follow through. This is a story about the unread shelf. The stack on
the nightstand. The Kindle library with three hundred titles, eighteen
of them ever opened. The bookstore weekend habit you cannot quite explain
to the people who tease you about it. The small private guilt almost
every reader in the world has been carrying around for most of their
adult life — about books, of all things, which are supposed to be one
of the most innocent pleasures available to a human being.
You have been carrying that guilt for too long.
The unread shelf is not what you have been told it is. It is not waste.
It is not failure. It is not procrastination. It is, in fact, one of
the most accurate physical records of an interior life that nobody else
in your life can see. The Italian scholar Umberto Eco kept thirty
thousand of them in his home in Milan. The Lebanese-American thinker
Nassim Taleb argued they were more valuable than the ones you had
finished. And the Japanese gave the whole behavior a small, accurate,
almost affectionate name more than a hundred years ago.
By the end of this, you are going to know what to call it — and exactly
why you do not have to apologize for it ever again." from the video introduction
00:00 — A woman at a bookstore on a Saturday
01:30 — The voice in your head about the stack
03:00 — A modern script that is not very old
05:00 — Umberto Eco's library in Milan
07:30 — "These are the ones I have not read yet"
09:30 — The perfect philosophy shelf
11:30 — Nassim Taleb names it: the antilibrary
14:00 — Every book reveals ten more
15:30 — The book that waits twenty years
18:00 — Tsundoku — the Japanese word
20:30 — Back to the bookstore
22:45 — Three things to take with you
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