About
積ん読 — Tsundoku
Tsundoku (積ん読) is a beautiful Japanese word for the act of acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them. It combines tsunde-oku (to pile things up) with doku (to read).
It's not hoarding. It's aspirational collecting. Every unread book is a promise to your future self — a future self who apparently has unlimited free time and zero interest in sleep.
This site is a monument to that optimism: 3,619 books cataloged, 89% read, and roughly 7.4 years of nonstop reading to finish the rest. But who's counting?
How It Started
My mother got tired of my brother and me fighting over the five channels we got — PBS, FOX, CBS, NBC, and ABC — and took the drastic step of removing the television from the house entirely. With nothing to watch, I read. A lot. By fifth grade I was reading at a post-collegiate level and averaging several books a week, a pace I kept up well into my late teens.
As I've gotten older, free time has become the scarcest resource. The reading pace that once felt effortless has slowed to a fraction of what it was. Meanwhile, access to books has expanded beyond anything my childhood self could have imagined — digital libraries, free audiobooks, one-click purchases at 2 AM. The result is predictable: the rate of acquisition now permanently outpaces the rate of reading.
This site is what happens when you give that kid a database and an enrichment pipeline.
The Numbers
Free Reading
Many of these are in the public domain. I've linked to free reading and listening sources wherever I could:
How It's Built
This is a fully static site — no server, no database, no JavaScript frameworks fighting for your CPU. Just HTML, CSS, and a few Svelte islands for search and filtering. The same person who built enrichment pipelines for their unread books also went to great lengths to avoid a server bill.