Of moratoria and memes

‘Woman Reading in the Reeds, Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer’ by Édouard Vuillard (1909): Fitzwilliam Museum.

You may remember that a little while ago I proposed to initiate a Year of Reading Randomly into my plans. All well and good, you may have thought, but just wait until a shiny new meme catches his eye. And you may well have been right.

But, I suppose, behind my thinking was the knowledge that my book acquisition was again getting out of control. Again? Yes, again: lockdown had for a few months stopped me browsing in bookshops, my preferred method of acquiring books because of their physicality – looks and size and feel and design all make a difference to my enjoyment of a book.

But since then – despite regular boxing up of books I’d read, to be then gifted to charity shops, or the offering of titles to friends and family – somehow the dratted things kept worming their way into the house and filling up any flat surfaces, all much faster than I can consume them. What’s to do?

A meme to aid a moratorium

It’s time – in my case, anyway – to call a moratorium in my purchasing of books. Walk past that bookshop, I shall tell myself, Venture not into that secondhand emporium. And, especially, Ogle not that beautifully reviewed novel on one of the blogs you follow, much as it pains you. As I’ve frequently noted, those TBR piles won’t read themselves into non-existence; and with the incentive of a partner (who regularly and accusingly reminds me my study is running out of space for anyone to move within it) there’s every chance I will resist the siren calls of tsundoku imperceptibly shading into the OCD of bibliomania.

But oh! note that ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card I’ve dealt myself. A moratorium (from the Latin for a delay) merely means a suspension, a hiatus – it doesn’t mean never, ever again.

Even the siren meme, No more buying books until I’ve read the ones I own, is ambiguous and open to interpretation: it doesn’t mean all the books I own, surely? Not the reference books and nonfiction? Or classics or favoured titles reread on a regular basis? Or treasured volumes given as birthday or Christmas presents in childhood?

Monopoly jail

And with around a couple of thousand books already on my shelves (does that make me a compulsive book hoarder?) that’s going to be a tall order. At the rate of one a week that’ll mean it’ll be nearly – gulp – forty years before I can think of committing the aforementioned act of transgression. All I can say is, who’s going to keep local bookshops and authors and distributors and editors and proofreaders in gainful employment over those four decades if I don’t buy books? And, even more relevant, will I still be capable of reading when I’m over eleventy-one years old?!

So, let me be pragmatic about this resolution: I shall attempt to make my moratorium coincide with my Year of Reading Randomly for as long as I can manage. (Yes, I know 2023 still has half a month to go.) Like a wall made up of different bricks placed where they will go instead of in a regular pattern – the so-called ‘random bond’ – I shall take books as they come.

And hope that I haven’t already walled myself in behind those book piles.

#ReadRandomly – please feel free to use this meme if tsundoku has overcome you

Do you also suffer from tsundoku? Are you bordering on bibliomania? Are you getting walled in by your books? If so, do you have strategies to manage your, ahem, disorder?