One place for everything queued: books, films and TV, music. It consolidates the scattered lists already in the vault ([private link], the old Books/Book LIst) so there’s a single front door. The framing section first, because how you think about the pile changes whether it’s useful or just guilt.
The pile is the point
The unread stack is not a failure to read fast enough. Umberto Eco kept a personal library of around 30,000 books, most unread, and treated it as a research tool rather than a trophy shelf. Nassim Taleb named this an antilibrary in The Black Swan: the unread books are more valuable than the read ones because they map what you don’t yet know. The more you learn, the faster the unread rows grow, which is the correct direction.
Japanese has had a word for this since the Meiji era. Tsundoku fuses tsunde-oku (pile up and leave) with dokusho (reading); the phrase tsundoku sensei, a teacher with many books and no reading, appears in print by 1879 (attributed to the writer Mori Senzō), in the Meiji-era boom in cheap print. The same dynamic now runs across film watchlists and saved-album queues. Treat this note as an antilibrary across media, not a backlog to clear.
Books
To read:
- Brin, Uplift series (Sundiver / Startide Rising / The Uplift War). Connects to Uplift and Engineered Evolution.
- Egan, Diaspora
- Egan, Permutation City
More Egan is catalogued in Greg Egan. For consumption format, see Audiobook Player.
Finished, with notes: Children of Time, Recursion, Detour, Perfection.
Films and TV
To watch (migrated from [private link]):
- Sinners
- Song Sung Blue
- Gran Turismo
- Ford v Ferrari
- F1
- Total Recall
- Starship Troopers
- What the Deaf Man Heard
- Drops of God
Music
To hear (seed list, expand freely):
- Brian Eno, ambient catalogue (Music for Airports, On Land). The tape-loop and slow-LFO ideas already show up in your Ambient Drone Machine.
This section is the thinnest. The vault tracks music you’ve built (Music Tools) but not music to listen to, so this is the gap worth filling first.
Working the queue
Keep one status convention so the pile stays scannable. The vault already defines note states in [private link]; the same idea applies here: an item is queued, in progress, or done-with-notes. Done-with-notes graduates to its own note (as the read books did) and gets linked back from here. The antilibrary framing means you never “fall behind”; you just hold a map of intended attention.
Try it
Auto-aggregating queue (30-60 min, Obsidian + Dataview plugin). Add a status: field and a media: field (book/film/music) to the frontmatter of each item that has its own note, then drop a Dataview query block in this hub that lists every note where status = "to-read" grouped by media. What you’re looking for: the list maintains itself as you tag new notes, so this hub stops being a thing you hand-edit. If it works, adding a book note anywhere in the vault makes it surface here with no manual link.
See also
- Audiobook Player — how the books get consumed
- Greg Egan — author deep-dive feeding the books queue
Sources
- Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary — The Marginalian, on unread books as a research tool
- Tsundoku should enter the English language — Open Culture, on the term’s Meiji-era origin
- Tsundoku — Wikipedia, for the 1879 tsundoku sensei citation (Mori Senzō)