Cheating on my Tsundoku

 A year ago, I decided to make a healthy change in my life. I moved from the hectic and often stifling Argentine Buenos Aires to the calm and hospitable Uruguayan Montevideo, on the other side of the Río de la Plata. Along with me came my vast library, made up of books I've read over decades, books I've bought and never had the courage to read, and books barely skimmed that I've vowed to read through as soon as I get the chance.

A move involves throwing away some things and adopting new ones, but there are habits that are difficult to change. On my new bedside table, books began to pile up again as if they were endowed with a life of their own: old books immigrated from Buenos Aires together with recently arrived books, acquired in the second-hand bookstores of the Montevidean Tristán Narvaja flea market, a wonderful labyrinth for bibliophiles that soon made me forget the one on Corrientes Avenue in Buenos Aires.

This innocent pathology of accumulating books that have never been read and perhaps never will be, baptized tsundoku by the Japanese, is not a serious problem if it weren't for the fact that I buy books faster than it takes me to read them. And it's not that I never read anything: quite the contrary, I spend reading and rereading storybooks like Fictions or The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges, History of Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortázar and Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link because I really like reading collections of short stories, especially if they stimulate my imagination with surprising and wonderful ideas.

I also love reading flash fiction stories like those by Ana María Shua and by Augusto Monterroso —who not only wrote the famous The Dinosaur— and poems like those by Sylvia Plath and by E. E. Cummings and novels like those by Mario Levrero, by Kazuo Ishiguro and by Ian McEwan — I'm still waiting for Junot Díaz to put out a new novel as endearing and marvelous as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In addition, I love to read essays on popular science, philosophy and psychology.

The ones that interest me the most are the essays on new technologies and on the history of life and the evolution of the species; I am always wondering what happened to Humanity and what will become of us in the future when I am no longer in this the world and neither do my children or their children if they ever have children because I have no intention of selfishly imposing my genes to last for generations to come despite Richard Dawkins' view that humans are slaves to those tiny units of genetic information that make us brainless automata with the only vital objective of reproducing ourselves to perpetuate our genomic capital and I do not agree with this eminent scientist and writer because I do not care if my children decide to comply with the mandate of the species to have Darwinian descendants or dedicate themselves to activities that do not prioritize human procreation including dedicating themselves to being homosexual or transsexual or fluid or of any gender because if they want to they can have children without necessarily using their own genes, collapsing the intellectual scaffolding of this English scientist though I suspect that he would slyly argue that the selfish genes would still play their part but it would be through those of the biological donors of my offspring blithely unconcerned with their own genetic heritage and so the genes would always win out because people would keep coming into this world and each individual would have its own chromosomes and millions of genes that would continue to compete with each other to ensure the continuity of their descendants for ever and ever; now I will be able to sleep more peacefully because it will no longer matter if my own genes are altruistic or selfish and the only thing that will matter is that I have a bedside table full of books that I haven't read yet.

I formally declare that from now on I will begin to read in a methodical and sustained manner, and I will refrain from buying the new short stories by Ted Chiang and by Elia Barceló or the new novels by Enrique Vila-Matas and by Chuck Palahniuk or a compilation of the poems by Oliverio Girondo and by Marosa di Giorgio or the new popular science books by Yuval Noah Harari and by Carl Zimmer.
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As a matter of fact, I'm already cheating because all those books are stacked next to my bed and have been eagerly awaiting me for weeks.

Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Pushcart Prize nominee fiction writer, poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. He received numerous awards and was published in multiple languages in more than 50 countries around the world, including Germany.
He is the author of Los que están en el aire (Those Who Are in the Air), an anthology of flash fiction and short stories (Editorial Rosalba, Asunción, Paraguay, 2023).
He currently lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Facebook: Marcelo Medone / Instagram: @marcelomedone