Word Nerd Wednesday

Word Nerd Wednesday: What the Hell’s a Tsundokuholic?

What the hell is a tsundokuholic???

Hello and welcome to my very first blog post! If you’re asking yourself, “What in the hell is a tsundokuholic? That sounds like a made up word!” you’d be correct. Well, tsundoku is an actual word; I turned it into a condition. A quick Google search will yield the following information:

tsundoku – the act of purchasing books and letting them collect in a pile, unread

Let’s go back in time…

I feel like I need to put a soft filter on this post and flashback to my childhood for a moment. I have always loved reading. I mean, duh, I’m creating a book-centric blog. I was the nerdy kid who read before bed every night. My mom even bought me a special lamp that clamped on to the frame of my bunk bed so I could read at night without climbing in and out of the top bunk to turn off my regular lamp.

7 year old me, basically.
7 year old me, basically.

I’d crawl into bed with the latest Babysitter’s Club Little Sister book for a half hour of reading joy. My school library had a program called Books and Beyond (I’m sure other schools in the 90s had this too) where you would get prizes when you reached milestones for logging a certain number of hours of reading. Every week my heart would rapidly beat in anticipation of picking up my next bright pink log sheet after turning in my latest completed form. Obviously, I rocked that challenge and filled my pockets with faux-Gak, crazy erasers, elephant soap, and other wonderful dollar store junk only kids truly treasure.

“Wait a minute,” you’re thinking. “The name of your blog has to do with having a pile of unread books, but you’re talking about how you rocked the bookiest of all elementary school competitions. What happened?”

High school happened. I managed to continue reading voraciously through middle school, burning through Caroline B. Cooney books faster than the school library could supply them. Then the increased workload in high school, with two to three honors classes per year, made it more difficult to be the Joey Chestnut of YA novels. I’d start a book for fun and put it aside to study for a test or read a book for school, and pick up the fun book months later. Sometimes I’d start a few books all at once, get a few chapters in, and stop reading. I still haven’t finished reading Gone with the Wind and I started reading it fourteen years ago. FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. Same with Les Miserables.

After I graduated college, I began to notice all the books on my shelf with bookmarks stuck one-fourth or one-third of the way through them, marking my failures, and it bothered me. I have an issue with starting projects and never finishing them, so I decided pledging to finish every book I started to read from then on was a decent starting point. (Although I still haven’t finished GWTW or Les Miz, so the success of this experiment leaves something to be desired.)

I pledged to create my own Tsundokuholics Anonymous program for only myself, and finished a large number of books. The downside: forcing myself through books I really was not enjoying. I eventually realized if I continued reading books that weren’t compelling to me, it took me longer to read them. This in turn meant it took longer to get to a book I might actually like. I have since become more relaxed and pledged to stop reading terrible books. No more hate-reading Twilight and 50 Shades. If a book is painfully boring, I will abandon it at the halfway point. I’m finally getting back to that happy, warm feeling you only get from enjoying a captivating book before bed.

Mission Statement

My purpose with this blog is to document and review what I’ve read with honesty (sometimes brutal) and a heaping dollop of snark. When I love a book, I REALLY LOVE A BOOK AND NOW YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME GO ON ABOUT IT FOREVER AND THROW GRAMMAR AND STYLE TO THE WIND. When I hate a book, I REALLY HATE A BOOK AND NOW YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME GO ON ABOUT IT FOREVER AND THROW GRAMMAR AND STYLE TO THE WIND. I’m not going to outline everything I’m going to do on this blog because I’d rather ~~show you~~ all that organically and honestly. If you reached this point, you’re probably bored and you’re a trooper and this is almost over, I promise.

So, do you like reviews of nostalgic books? Current books? Rage-soaked Pretty Little Liars reviews? Stick around.

Advertisements

2 thoughts on “Word Nerd Wednesday: What the Hell’s a Tsundokuholic?

  1. In my school, Books and Beyond was called Accelerated Reader. Which is a BORING name! Your program’s name is much more interesting! I also enjoyed reading about Karen’s adventures in the Little Sister series. I was also into Horrible Harry and Amber Brown!

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://tsundokuholic.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/what-the-hell-is-a-tsundokuholic/
tsundokuholic.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
76638
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:V2TMTS5SL2Y6T7UIA5FA47VD7FQN77Q6
<urn:uuid:117d583f-3c2c-47ea-9be9-c4fdcc0e88b6>
2017-06-25T12:11:03Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:JO3DIKM3V6WCPD6J5MLQS43YOD2SLYX6
<urn:uuid:c0d9fb4e-c354-49ab-9d63-1d23211bc103>
https://tsundokuholic.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/what-the-hell-is-a-tsundokuholic/
length
response
<urn:uuid:a78897f2-2557-4127-a9a1-9baac2a55c22>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-166-65-68.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf