The Japanese have a lot of intriguing expressions that don’t seem to have a translated equivalent in English – a favorite is shinrin-yoku “forest bathing”, meaning walking in the forest for relaxation and improved health, which sounds like some kind of ancient wisdom but is really a recently named and studied phenomenon. One which speaks to me as true, living as I do three houses away from the forest.
Another expression to reach my attention is tsundoku, which means the act of buying books to leave unread, piled up with other unread books. What, there’s actually a word to describe this behavior of mine?
We recently got back from a trip to Victoria where I indulged myself in their independent new and used bookstores. Now I don’t INTEND to leave these unread but at some point it is pretty easy to get carried away. Last Christmas I gathered up all the unread books I’d bought over the course of the year, put them into 2 huge holiday gift bags and stuck them under the tree as a present to myself. A slightly weird form of regifting. Christmas morning, it was as if Santa had arrived – surprises in store as I’d forgotten about many of them.
I know only a few people whose preferred means of reading is a Kindle. Most of my friends still like books. I do carry a Kindle while traveling which is when it is really useful, but as I’ve said before, I don’t really like it, it doesn’t suit me or the way I read. Over the years distribution has changed – I remember back when one of the large Canadian bookstores (Indigo) acquired the other (Chapters) and the big hue and cry over that, the thinking that this huge mega-book chain would wipe out the independents. Then when Amazon arrived, it was predicted that this would be the end of all bookstores, large and small.
Chapters/Indigo now is pretty underwhelming, and certainly each year in the one closest to us the floor space devoted to actual books seems to shrink, replaced by increased instore Starbucks square footage and aisles of displays of scented candles and the like. Meanwhile, in many of the small towns and cities around here, the independents still hang on. I’m glad to see this and make a point of supporting them, even when an Amazon purchase would be cheaper.
I read the other day that the growth of ebooks is slowing, while sales of ‘real’ books increased. I don’t know if this is true, but the death of books is certainly overstated. The town of Sydney, up the road from Victoria near the ferry terminal is now marketing itself as Sydney Booktown “Canada’s Only Booktown”, making its half dozen or so bookstores (a big number for a small town) a big destination for me on this last trip. At the rate these new books are piling up, it looks like this is shaping up once again to be a dynamite Christmas this year.
Here’s some other unique Japanese expressions that made me smile.
