Humanity has a collective habit of trying to change at the beginning of each cycle: whether it’s an annual summer bucket list, or the beginning of a new semester or quarter, or the start of a new relationship, we all try to put new beginnings to good use.
Perhaps the most popular example of this is the slew of resolutions we set with each new year. As the clock strikes midnight, we promise ourselves new futures and new habits to become better.
It’s with this determination that we’re approaching the beginning of our resolutions series, ABS-CBN.com’s three-part discussion on the most common new year resolutions.
Most resolutions focus on three major topics: health and exercise, finance and spending, and personal growth, like reading or pursuing hobbies and skills.
We’re about 30 years into the Internet Age. Three decades is just about long enough for people to start romanticizing the undigitized parts of life: especially books.
Reading more books is consistently one of the most popular new year resolutions, with literature and reading becoming more idealized in the public eye.
The “performative” man trying to project his ideal self into the world always has a book in hand, while an entire subsection of TikTok is devoted to helping viewers choose which books to buy and which ones are interesting.
BookTok and memes aside, the rest of the population still seems to be enamored with the idea of being an avid reader: from Pinterest boards showing cozy libraries and reading nooks, to essays and wistful writings about the smell of old books, to listicles giving tips on how to actually read more books.
Our fascination with becoming a better reader didn’t just start with the Internet Age in the early 1990s. An innate thirst for collective knowledge and connection with human thought has been around for so long that there’s a centuries-old Japanese word encapsulating the problem: tsundoku.
The word, coined in the Meiji era (circa 1863), describes the phenomenon of acquiring more books without getting around to reading them. The result, then, is a stack of untouched books, which author Nassim Nicholas Taleb would later call an “antilibrary” in 2007.
Whether you call it a pile, a stack, an antilibrary, or tsundoku, the phenomenon shows that we all want to read more, but often fall short.
It’s a recurring and elusive goal, often set at the beginning of the New Year as a resolution in hopes that the extra motivation will help us accomplish it.
But why, exactly, does tsundoku happen, and why is it becoming more and more common?
It’s easiest to blame the Internet Age. It’s been shown to worsen our attention span and reduce our tolerance for new and complicated ideas.
Our focus is more fragile, and we have a preference for ideas that are already similar to ours and easy to digest. This combination of factors makes it difficult to consume long-form videos or even content that we don’t agree with, much less immerse ourselves in books that are hundreds of pages long.
A digital age also makes it exceedingly difficult to participate in our own lives. It’s easier and satisfying enough to watch a timelapse of someone reading, or a short clip of someone setting up their reading nook, or videos of vloggers going to book clubs or libraries.
Looking up book reviews online or reading a list of tips on how to become a better reader also makes us feel like we’re making progress towards our goal, without having to leaf through a single page.
Reading is a desirable trait to possess for obvious reasons: it improves our intelligence, literacy, cognitive skills, empathy, and well-being.
The visual aesthetics of a reader are romanticized more and more, so why do so many of us seem incapable of surpassing tsundoku?
Rather than solely blaming the internet or some intellectual weakness or lack of willpower, it’s more likely due to an all-or-nothing mindset stemming from perfectionism.
The problem may be rooted in a mentality that insists reading a page or two doesn’t really count: it needs to be dozens of books, or thousands of pages. There needs to be a reading nook and annotated notes for one to be considered a reader.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, an author who has created intricate and complex novels that won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is not bound by the pressure to devour books and complete as many of them as possible.
“I’ve put down books when I’m not enjoying them. I believe that life is too short to waste on books that are not a pleasure to read.” This may be the key to finding our way back to reading — to begin with books that are fun, and to stop when they are no longer enjoyable. Over time, our focus and capacity to digest written works will develop naturally as a result.
Tsundoku may not be entirely bad, as long as we make an attempt to read through our stack gently, refining our palate and preferences along the way. (ABS-CBN News)