Books

When you can't stop buying books

By Chiedza, February 28 2024

Reading books is a popular hobby as you can easily while away time or just fall asleep reading one. However, it's very easy to get into the habit of buying books you don't end up reading. Interestingly enough, there's a term for such a habit: tsundoku. Tsundoku is a Japanese term for people who buy a lot of books they never get around to reading. 

The Japanese word doku means "reading", and it comes from tsumu which means "to pile up". So, tsundoku refers to the practice of piling up reading material.

Quite similarly, the term Bibliomania came into the picture when Thomas Frognall Dibdin's wrote a book with the very same title. Bibliomania comes from the Greek biblio, which refers to books, and mania, "madness".

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Tsundoku: The Art of Buying Books You Can't Possibly Read
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Dune sequel set for release

By James, March 03 2022

After the box office success of Dune last year, director Denis Villeneuve confirms a second chapter of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic is in the making.

“Right now,” he announced, “I’m in what you call ‘soft prep’… It’s that beautiful part where it’s just dreaming, looking at the ceiling and thinking about the movie storyboards… It’s the moment where everything is possible, before we have the shock of reality that will come.”

Like many films of the COVID era, Dune was originally slated for release in 2020 but wound up being postponed to 2021. Despite the roadblock, the sci-fi epic has managed to live up to the hype, with anticipation now building for a sequel.

“[The sequel] has direct continuity to the first movie,” stated Villeneuve. “[So] it's important for me that the audiences see Part Two as soon as possible.” Though an official release date is yet to be set for the new film, Warner Bros anticipates its appearance late 2023.

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Dune’s Denis Villeneuve Provides An Update On The Sequel
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Murakami's "First Person Singular"

By The English Farm, May 25 2021

National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly-funded American news organization, held an interview with the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami about his new collection of stories, First Person Singular. In this collection, Murakami writes in the first-person singular “I” perspective.

Murakami said, "There's a long tradition in modern Japanese literature of the autobiographical, so-called I-novel, the idea that sincerity lies in honestly and openly writing about your life, making a kind of self-confession. I'm opposed to that idea and wanted to create my own 'first personal singular' writing."

Murakami goes on to explain that he often writes characters based on his personal experiences and rewrites them multiple times to the point that the experiences become fictional and hard to recognize from his own life.

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Haruki Murakami: 'I've Had All Sorts Of Strange Experiences In My Life'
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