Hello, world!

If you’re here by mistake, welcome! Feel free to stick around and hang out.

If you’re not here by mistake, double welcome! I’m honoured and delighted that you’ve deliberately decided to come here to my humble blog. Take your shoes off, have some tea, make yourself comfortable.

Seeing as this is the first post, I had best get something out of the way quick, yeah? And that’s the answer to the question you’re probably asking yourself right now:

“What’s up with the title? Tsun-wha . . . ? What kind of stacks?”

Well, in a word, I’m a nerd — and a word nerd at that! XD

(Yes, there will be lots of these sorts of verbal shenanigans. Get used to it.)

Specifically, I’m a nerd who reads voraciously and has an equally rapacious appetite for collecting books. It’s just a sad fact that my collecting impulses vastly outpace my actual ability to read said books in anything resembling a timely fashion. ‘^^ Thus, I have many a stack of unread books, printed & virtual. Serendipitously, there’s a word for this tendency to acquire books that one does not in fact read (at least, not yet!):

Tsundoku.

No, you’re right: it’s not English. Per Wikipedia & Wiktionary, it’s a romanized portmanteau of two Japanese words: 積んでおく tsunde oku “to leave piled up (in preparation)” + 読書 dokusho “reading (books),” or just 読 doku “to read.” Smash the two words together, and you get 積ん読 tsundoku “books piled up in preparation to be read” — a word that describes the state of my house and home. Possibly my entire life, ahem. XD

And then there’s “stacks” because of the whole piling concept imbedded in tsundoku itself, with an additional nod to library stacks, which are basically my home away from home. ^_^

There you have it. TBR (To Be Read) books in literal and library stacks.

The next question I bet you’re asking yourself is something along the lines of . . .

“So this blog is about books?”

Yes! . . . and no. ‘^^ I will definitely be going on and on about books — for sure. My first and deepest love is and will forever be books. But I’m also just a huge geek in general, and my tastes in assorted geekeries are wide and varied, and so, no, this blog will not be exclusively about books (read or otherwise) but about . . . well, whatever I want. XD I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things — much like stacks of books are really just a lot of thoughts about a lot of things. And I’m carving out a space on the Intarwebz for me to say those thoughts aloud where other people (*gasp*) can “hear” them, if they want. (I would have titled this “Meditations,” but Marcus Aurelius, the jerk, already snagged that one. And John Scalzi snagged “Whatever.” *sighs*)

Anyways, just imagine that you’ve entered the home of an eccentric reader and book collector who has in fact read a lot of the books she owns (and many others she does not own but wished she did XD) and so has a lot of things rattling around in her mental attic and who also likes to ramble on and on (and on) about those rattling things and who is also rather fond of alliteration, not to mention the word “also” and run-on sentences. . . . (Yeah . . . best strap in. XD)

So, er . . . yes! ( ✿＾▽＾)／ⓦⓔⓛⓒⓞⓜⓔ いらっしゃいませ! 歡迎，歡迎！

P.S.: This blog is an experiment — which basically means “expect changes” — and a lot of them, as I try a whole lot of things. Hopefully, the changes will be in the “Oooooh! That’s much better!” direction, but they may very well be in the “Ick! Why did you do that??” direction. This is an iterating, work-in-progress kind of a thing, not a polished anything. Judging by how long it took just to launch the damned thing (due to oh-so-fun technical difficulties), if it had to be polished to a perfect patina (what was that about alliteration again . . . ?) on top of that, right out of the gate, it wouldn’t ever have happened. So, yeah. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. XP

P.P.S.: Oh, and I make no promises about writing this blog entirely in English, for this eccentric reader and all-around nerd is also rather nerdy about languages, having studied a few. (Yes, yes, I know, you came for the books you didn’t even know were promised in the title, but you’re staying for the chaos charm, right? ^.~)