The group dispersed after fond farewells. Rini continued lingering in her chair. The still-heavy bag lay in the next chair, only one friend had taken one. Sighing, Rini rose and left without looking back, afraid someone would come rushing to return the bag of books she had left behind.
Rini had too many books. In the last three years, her phone claimed her attention and slashed her reading time. As an antidote, she had joined a book club. Her father would order books frequently and she swiped many of them. She thus collected several books, of which she read very few. Never mind the romance around tsundoku, it was a failure to self-regulate, she decided. The multitudes of the unread and the unfinished were suffocating her. However, she couldn’t stop acquiring them. Actually, she had only about two hundred; what weighed her down was the self-reproach at her lack of discipline.
Maybe if she gave away the unread ones, she could begin afresh? No libraries or schools in her city wanted any. Voluntary organisations wanted only textbooks and educational books. Only a few of her friends wanted any. The longer she waited for a decent solution, the more she accumulated. Should she burn them? No! So she started losing them. On the bus, on the train, at cafes, at a holiday resort, at stores, in a distant park. It often felt like a stealth operation. She deleted the audiobook app without claiming her credits. She deleted the unread books on her e-reader. Over the next year, she felt lighter. Relieved that there was no book to go back home to. Strange, she didn’t even feel like reading now. Had she gone too far? Rini couldn’t tell.
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