Maria’s Bookshop feeds a certain kind of hunger. The walls lined with bookshelves, the iconic rolling ladders, a canoe suspended from the ceiling—it’s a local independent bookstore perched on the cusp between ethereal and material, with thousands of things to buy and own.
My father, who loves and has always loved books, sometimes visits Maria’s twice a week. He’s seduced by titles with dogs or cats, or famous people he still remembers—whether or not he likes a particular celebrity. He snaps up books that feature bookstores or Paris or trains—at some point, he had two copies of The Little Paris Bookshop; a month after I gave one away, I noticed he’d accidentally bought another.
When he leaves Maria’s, he’s toting a bright red bag heavy with his new purchases.
Collecting books was once an eccentric habit for him. He’d dip into several at once, simultaneously caught up in an Alan Furst mystery and a biography of Theodore Roosevelt while also skimming a history of Durango and a book about the journalism industry.
The new books, unread, now end up perched precariously on already-crammed shelves, or in piles on his bed and the rest of his house. Still, it’s hard to resist when my father wants to visit the bookstore. The staff members know him, and they offer his dog Maggie treats and affection. There are usually children and other interesting people, giant stuffed animals, and a rotating exhibit of local artwork.
And, of course, books.
Once, when Dad seemed especially quiet. I wanted to cheer him up. Maybe we should stop by Maria’s, I said. “But only if you promise to limit yourself to buying one book.”
“One book?” My father frowned. “Then we might as well not go.”
Tsundoku is a Japanese term that means, roughly, “acquiring books and allowing them to remain unread.”1 Originally, it seems to have been used to criticize professors who owned many books but read too few, but the word doesn’t retain that negative connotation.
Tsundoku can be purposeful, a practice or a habit—or an art.
Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it another way in his 2010 bestseller, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”
The tendency to focus on what we know, or think we know, makes us unprepared for impactful rare events that can’t be predicted, Taleb writes. He believes that focus is a kind of arrogance, and he tells this story to illustrate his point:
The writer Umberto Eco … is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.
The unread books are reminders of the immensity of what we don’t know. Of the fact that we don’t know. They teach us humility, a humility so important that Taleb coins a new term for what the books represent:
You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
“I have six libraries,” my dad used to claim. He insisted on giving any visitors—friends, caregivers, his piano instructor, a plumber—a tour that included these and the pictures hung throughout his house.
What he actually has are several areas with a few bookshelves, although, granted, he does own an impressive number of books. Five or six years ago, a friend asked him to return one she’d loaned him: The Emperor Wears no Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy. Why he borrowed that particular paperback is lost to me—I don’t think he’s ever tried marijuana, and conspiracy theories usually leave him cold.
He couldn’t find the hemp book. After asking him a few times, the friend emailed me, so I searched my dad’s bookshelves. No luck. She asked me to check again, and, finally, I sent her a new copy from Amazon. A few weeks later, I discovered the original copy, buried under some papers in my father’s office.
Exasperated, I ordered labels from a library supplies store, bought a couple of second-hand shelves, and went to work.
“A person’s library is often a symbolic representation of his or her mind,” writes Kevin Mims, one of several writers enchanted by Taleb’s implied redemption for owners of unread books.
A man who has quit expanding his personal library may have reached the point where he thinks he knows all he needs to and that what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. He has no desire to keep growing intellectually. The man with an ever-expanding library understands the importance of remaining curious, open to new ideas and voices.
The organizing gave me pleasure, as if I were also ordering the chaos of my father’s existence. He surely already had dementia when I started the process, but he was still so functional, so independent.
Arranging my father’s books was also something my mother would have done, something like the way she’d help him—or my brother or sister or me—to more easily, more fully, be ourselves.
I decided that books about journalism, writing, and current events would live behind my father’s office desk. A section on spirituality and religions, and another one on self-help, ended up in a far-off hallway’s end, because they didn’t seem to fall within my dad’s current interests as often. But sometimes, the bookshelves were in strange places because those were the only available spaces left: A tall case near my father’s laundry room houses books on trains and the West.
There’s a humor section, and a music section, and a section with books on animals. There are poetry books, although I don’t think my dad reads poetry.
It gratified me to gather the many Patrick O’Brian novels and other swashbuckling tales together in their own section on “Ships and the Sea,” where I imagined my father happening upon them, reveling in the choices within a subject that delighted him.
There’s a small Christmas section, with three or four copies of The Christmas Carol, gifts from the family because he used to read aloud from it on Christmas morning. And I found a few books from my childhood, and classic editions from my mom’s college days, or maybe these were gifts from my parents’ parents.
My dad was delighted with the organization, and, for a while, we’d frequently stroll around the house admiring it together. He especially liked the travel section, with its dreams of exploring made tangible. Now and then, I’d suggest we make room for his other purchases by giving away one of his five books on Costa Rica, or one of his Spanish language dictionaries. He’d have none of it.
My father’s very favorite part about the project was that I’d placed all his books about presidents together, underneath rows of encyclopedias on a built-in just off the kitchen. “That’s a hobby of mine,” he’d say, still says, meaning his interest in U.S. presidents. He’ll stop and gaze at the array of hardbacks, not seeing them exactly but sensing the kind of information he used to enjoy, the person he once was. A man with sound knowledge about current events, steeped in an understanding of their historical context.
My dad now rediscovers whole genres he’d forgotten he owned. I’ve found five or six books from the spirituality section—Thich Nhat Hanh, and buddhism for beginners and one on Christianity for men—scattered across his bed. Or the entire collection of twenty books about animals—more than once.
“I have eight libraries,” he told me a couple of months ago, and I noticed the number had grown.
My father’s book collection, with its wide range of subjects, genres, and places that his open-minded curiosity led him to explore, is like a snapshot of his past. When I spend the night at his house, I usually sleep in the one room we do call a library, where a floor-to-ceiling shelf takes up an entire wall.
“Help yourself if you need anything to read,” my dad will tell me, or, “If you stay there, you have to read all the books.” I like examining the long rows of fiction to see what caught his interest in the past: novels by Ann Patchett and Anna Quindlan, surely leftovers from my mother’s reading, but also more recent books like Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead—what led him to pick those up? There are others, by Colm Tóibín, Carson McCullers and Cormac McCarthy and Danielle Steel and Irving Stone and Donna Tartt, in a dizzyingly random sweep of twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors of fiction.
Hardly any of which he’s read, I’d guess.
The unread books represent something else for my dad now. When he buys new ones, I believe he’s trying to grasp the shell of his former experiences, his former self. As I’ve written before, he now seems mostly to interact with the surfaces of things—the book covers, the act of buying this symbol of what was once a portal to further knowledge, to other people’s minds.
The idea of tsundoku makes me think about whether we have some part of dementia wrong because we can’t help but yearn for how someone used to be, for the shared memories and intellect. I don’t want to suggest that the condition isn’t difficult and heart-breaking. It is. But I also wonder: As a mind rids itself of certain kinds of clutter, is it ever possible it makes room for something better? Or, at the very least, perhaps, to act as a silent reminder of how much we don’t know?
While his condition doesn’t remind him of how much he’s forgotten, perhaps my dad’s dementia is sometimes like a collection of unread books for the people who witness it. His emptier brain doesn’t seem to lead him to a more enlightened existence, at least not yet. He, like so many of us, has too many barriers, too much ego and pride.
I think of my dad at a recent gathering, when he didn’t understand the purpose of the get-together, the future plans under discussion. A small jazz combo was playing in the background; most of us acknowledged them and then turned away to chat. Not my dad, who was overjoyed to see a saxophone player he knew, who danced to the music. Who was still talking the next day about his thrill in the music. Emptied of the other concerns that evening, my dad’s mind was free to focus on the moment.
A tsundoku-kind-of challenge for the rest of us.
“How many libraries do I have?” my dad asked me recently.
See the Wikipedia definition or Cambridge Dictionary. For more discussions, see Kevin Dickinson’s piece or Jessica Stillman’s essay.
This is splendid. You’ve honored your father and shared his life in a respectful, honest way. What a wonderful opportunity for the both of you to share his treasured books. Brilliant idea to organize and keep his book collections and libraries.
My mom has had dementia over 12 years and she reads biographies daily. She has a stack of them next to her bed on her night stand. She has moved from her home, to our house and now lives in a care home and even though she may not remember what she read each day she loves reading hours at bedtime. Thank you for this glimpse into your dad’s life. Keep up the good work!