A Louisiana reader confronts tsundoku: Danny Heitman

Thanks to the internet, which is always teaching me new things, I’ve learned a new word this month. It’s tsundoku, a Japanese term for the habit of piling up reading material without getting around to reading it.

What a lovely word, and so meaningful for me since it points a sharp finger at my own pile of unread books. I can see the stack right now as I write this, hoping the tall column of volumes does not, like a literary Tower of Babel, collapse across the keyboard before I finish this sentence. I won’t take you, title by title, through that yard-high backlog of books awaiting my attention. I will only say that it’s various, ranging from the 18th century Englishman Horace Walpole’s “Selected Letters” to Tish Harrison Warren’s “Liturgy of the Ordinary” to John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa.”

Is tsundoku especially bad in Louisiana, where a lot of us tend to live in the same place a long time? Moves can nudge you to thin out libraries, and I’m inclined to think that living at the same address for three decades, as I have, is a temptation to keep too much.

One of the great dodges of a packrat, of course, is to point to someone else who hoards even more than you do. In that spirit, I’ll mention Jill Lepore, the Harvard history professor and staff writer at The New Yorker whose personal library runneth over. When I googled her the other day, my new item of vocabulary, tsundoku, quickly came to mind. A picture of Lepore in The Harvard Crimson reveals a workplace where books have spilled from their shelves and colonized every surface, the whole room a republic of words.

All of which has made me wonder if a truly full life is inevitably like this, as insistent in its plenitude as a river spilling its banks. Lepore is on my mind these days because I’ve been reading “The Deadline,” her new collection of essays. The essays are as varied as her intellect, which ranges over everything from Rachel Carson to presidential politics to the trials and ecstasies of motherhood. Her title, “The Deadline,” points to the basic reality of a writer’s life — namely, that however grand your ideas, they’ll seldom reach an audience if you can’t deliver them on time.

This is probably the best thing about these essays — how they meet the reader at street level, always grounding themselves in the tangible, the essential, the real. There’s a lovely essay about Lepore’s mother, who carried an easel and brushes in her car just in case she spotted something worth painting on her errands. “I never knew anyone better prepared to meet with beauty,” Lepore writes.

Lepore’s essays are equally open to possibility, even when they deal with difficult subjects. Although it’s time for me to purge my pile of books, I suspect that “The Deadline” will be a keeper.

Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.