Why you keep buying books you don’t read – and why it feels so good

At busy times, I find I simply cannot read as much as I would like to. Life has a habit of filling every available hour with work, meetings, emails, chores, errands and deadlines. Standing in one of my natural habitats – a bookshop – it is frustrating to see so many things I want to read while knowing I do not have the time.

My usual consolation is to buy the book anyway and let a small, satisfying pile build up, looking ahead to the next quieter stretch when I might finally open them. It is oddly satisfying. Some might call this clutter. The Japanese have a far more elegant word for it: tsundoku.

The term describes the habit of acquiring books and allowing them to accumulate unread. It combines the idea of stacking things up (tsunde), leaving something for later (oku) and reading (doku). The result is a concept that captures the quiet optimism of a pile of books.

Far from being a sign of being time poor or lacking in discipline, tsundoku may reveal something surprisingly important about how the brain responds to anticipation.

Dopamine effect

When we encounter something that promises enjoyment or discovery, the brain’s reward system becomes active. One important pathway runs from the ventral tegmental area, a dopamine-producing region in the...

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