Tag Archives: tsundoku

Staying connected to reality via literature

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Decorative image of a painting by Sarah EvansFor most of this year, I have not been a frequent visitor to bookshops so I am not suffering from tsundoku [see ‘Tsundoku’ on May 24th, 2017].  Instead, I have been unable to resist borrowing books from people when visiting them for weekends [see ‘Fictional planetary emergencies’ on June 4th, 2025].  This has allowed me to enjoy Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, Fen by Daisy Johnson, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel.  The last one describes the experiences of the narrator living in a Middle Eastern country while her husband works as civil engineer on a lucrative employment contract.  It is a thriller but the cultural differences between life in a Middle Eastern kingdom and the West for a professional woman are shocking and perhaps should be a ‘must-read’ for anyone tempted by lucrative job offers in the Middle East.  A month or so later, I borrowed from the same bookshelf Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami and The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby.  ‘Hope’ describes a boat journey across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain by migrants and the back stories of the migrants that induced them to take the extraordinary risks of paying a people trafficker for the crossing in an overcrowded small boat.  The ‘Optician’ is a first person account of someone who, when cruising in their boat with a group of friends, rescued dozens of migrants from the Mediterranean Sea after their boat sank.  However, the rescue was too late for hundreds of men, women and children.  The book deals with the grief of the rescuers and their shock at the response of the Italian authorities.  In a world in which many people are becoming increasingly tribal and insular, within their own bubble [see ‘You’re all weird!’ on February 8th, 2017], it is crucial that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) people stay connected with the realities created by our addiction to fossil fuels and the deep inequalities of wealth – literature can help us connect, especially literature based on real-life experience.

References:

Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water, Penguin Books, 2022.

Daisy Johnson, Fen, Penguin Books, 2017.

Emma Jane Kirby,  The Optician of Lampedusa, 2017.

Hilary Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Harper Collins Publishers, 2004.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Penguin Books, 2025.

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Algonquin Books, New York.

Image: Painting by Sarah Evans owned by the author.

A short scramble in the Hindu Kush

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I have been resolving an extreme case of Tsundoku [see ‘Tsundoki‘ on May 24th, 2017] over the last few weeks by reading ‘A short walk in the Hindu Kush‘ by Eric Newby which I bought nearly forty years ago but never read, despite taking it on holiday a couple of years ago.  Although it was first published in 1958, it is still in print and on its 50th edition; so, it has become something of classic piece of travel writing.  It is funny, understated and very English, or least early to mid 20th century English.

It felt quite nostalgic for me because about thirty years ago I took a short walk in Gilgit Baltistan. Gilgit Baltistan is in northern Pakistan on the border with China and to the west of Nuristan in Afghanistan where Eric Newby and Hugh Carless took their not-so short walk.  I went for a scramble up a small peak to get a better view of the mountains in the Hindu Kush after a drive of several days up the Karakorum Highway.  We were driven from Islamabad to about a mile short of the border with China on the Khunjerab pass at 4730 m [compared to Mont Blanc at 4810 m].

I was there because the Pakistani Government supplied a small group of lecturers with a mini-bus and driver to take us up the Karakorum Highway [and back!] in exchange for a course of CPD [Continuing Professional Development] lectures on structural integrity.  This we delivered in Islamabad to an audience of academics and industrialists during the week before the trip up the Karakoram Highway.  So, Eric Newby’s description of whole villages turning out to greet them and of seeing apricots drying in the sun on the flat roofs of the houses brought back memories for me.

Tsundoku

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I used to suffer from tsundoku but now I am almost cured…  Tsundoku is a Japanese word meaning ‘the constant act of buying books but never reading them’.  I still find it hard to walk into a good bookshop and leave without buying a small pile of books.  I did it early this month in the Camden Lock Books and left with ‘The New Leaders‘ by Daniel Goleman, ‘What we talk about when we talk about love‘ by Raymond Carver and ‘The Fires of Autumn‘ by Irène Némirowsky.  I will probably read all of these three books over the coming months so it was not really an act of tsundoku.  But, it’s perhaps only because there are so few really good bookshops left that I don’t  buy more in a year than I can read.  Although this is not quite true in my professional life, because I have started buying books on-line and the pile of unread books in my office is growing; so I am not completely cured of tsundoku.  Actually, all researchers are probably suffering from it because we collect piles of research papers that we never read – in part because we can’t keep up with the 2.5 million papers published every year.  And, it’s growing by about 5% per annum, according to Sarah Boon; perhaps, because there are more than 28,000 scholarly journals publishing peer-reviewed research.  Of course, that’s what happens if you measure research productivity in terms of papers published – it’s a form of Goodhart’s law [see my post entitled ‘Goodhart’s Law‘ on August 6th, 2014].