I was strolling with my wife in Brookline, Massachusetts, on a charming street with clothing and gift stores, Japanese restaurants, delis, and a Japanese tea house. I ducked into a bookstore, assuring my wife that I would be out in a minute, not pivoting quickly enough to miss her exasperated eye roll. After browsing the fiction and poetry sections, examining the New Releases and Bargain tables and the Staff Picks rack, and then doing an analysis of which book covers made a book stand out (getting ideas for the cover design for my then upcoming novel, Splintered River), I purchased two books and re-joined my wife.

“You bought something, didn’t you,” she said when she saw me smiling.

Now, my wife is an avid reader, and she fully supports my literary pursuits, but she knows that, although I read a lot (sixty-four books completed last year) and widely (literary fiction, crime and sci-fi novels, history, poetry, biography), there is no way I can keep up with the sheer volume of books that I buy. And, every time I pause in my book purchasing, pauses that last, maybe a few days at most, I very quickly see a book that I have to have, that might then sit on my shelf for years unread, because there are so many books lined up ahead of it!

I now have scores of unread books, counting physical books piled up on the shelves of my built-in bookshelf and a side table, stacked in piles on the ledges of the bookshelf, on the floor, and on my nightstand, and ebooks and audiobooks stored on my phone. I receive daily emails from six discount audiobook and ebook companies offering their wares for anywhere between free to $5. I am a sucker for used bookstores (“too musty for me” says my wife), where I look for unexpected bargains to leap out at me. There are always classic works of literature or forgotten gems of genre fiction, or previously unknown works of poetry that I might actually understand, to be discovered.

My wife asked me why I can’t just use the library, and my answer is quite simple: because I need to own books! I need to pencil in the margins examples of great writing, and to save them for future inspiration. But I think the real reason is that I just need to be surrounded by books, a surplus of books, to have them right at hand, ready to do service to enlighten, amuse, challenge, inspire and comfort me at my whim. And to have them available to actually read but also as potential. Having so many unread books makes me feel that there is great literature and knowledge there at my fingertips, and being right there is the next best thing to actually being inside me. I tell my wife that mine is a harmless and relatively inexpensive obsession, and she points out how much work it will take to pack them all up and transport them when we eventually move. Seeing me unconvinced, all she could do was to buy me a coffee mug that said: “Bookaholic.”

Some of this probably has its roots in my childhood (I am a psychologist, after all). I grew up relatively poor in small apartments in New York City and, as scarce as money was, my parents never hesitated to buy me books when I wanted them. Since I shared a room with my brother, and there was no place in the apartment for privacy, I used to read at night in the bathtub, until my mother discovered me and kicked me out, because that was not a place intended for reading (a flimsy reason, as far as I’m concerned).

There is a Japanese term, tsundoku, that combines tsumu (to pile up) and doku (reading), which refers to the act of amassing piles of unread books. This term is not used to denigrate the practice but to amusingly appreciate it. It does not refer to hoarding, in the sense of collecting books just to collect them, but rather to collecting books for the love of reading them. And part of the love of reading them is the love of having them.

I used to find it frustrating that I would never have time to read all of my books, but a workshop leader reframed my perspective. She said that you can adopt an attitude of scarcity, in which you are always thinking about what you haven’t read, or an attitude of abundance, in which you are grateful for always having so many things yet to read. So now, I look at my piles and the thumbnails on my phone and smile. There is so much waiting for me, and I take comfort in knowing that it will never run out!

E. H. Jacobs is a New England-based psychologist and writer. He is the author of the novel, Splintered River, and the forthcoming, Into a Wider Sky. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Temple University. His work (short stories, poetry, cnf) has appeared in Hippocampus, Streetlight Magazine, Abandoned Mine, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Bryant Literary Review, Penstricken, and elsewhere. He has published two books on parenting, and he has been a contributing book review editor for the American Journal of Psychotherapy. He has served on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. His work can be seen at www.ehjacobsauthor.com.