Tsundoku-2026 Collection Overview

積ん読 (tsundoku, n.) — The Japanese practice of acquiring books, films, or other media and letting them pile up, unread or unwatched. From tsunde (to stack) + oku (to leave for later) + doku (reading). Not a failure of intention — a record of curiosity.

A snapshot of the full collection as of 2026 — books, comics, TTRPGs, movies, and a vast visual reference archive. The catalogued side is the reading and gaming material; the broader collection extends across streaming services, a 700+ app library, and 667k+ images on an iPhone Air (1TB).

Total catalogued items: ~5,357

Kindle Books (kindle_books_clean.csv) — 2,743 titles

All but one are Purchased (one Borrowed). Genre breakdown based on sampled titles:

• Military SF / Space Opera — Galaxy's Edge, Expeditionary Force, Forgotten Ruin, Rogue Team International, and a deep bench of indie series
• Cyberpunk — Goodwin's Cyberpunk Saga, Neon Horizon, Sol Arbiter, Altered Carbon adjacent
• Classic SF — Gibson (Sprawl Trilogy), Hamilton (Salvation Sequence), Asher (Rise of Jain), Elizabeth Bear (White Space), Vinge, Silverberg
• Fantasy — Sanderson (Stormlight Archive), Muir (Locked Tomb), Bardugo (Shadow & Bone / King of Scars)
• D&D / Eberron fiction — Keith Baker, Tim Waggoner, Jim Zub (heavy Jim Zub presence throughout)
• Non-fiction — Neal Ford (software architecture), Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction), Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence), Jaron Lanier
• Gaming tie-ins — The Witcher, Dragon Age, D&D Young Adventurers series, BG3 guide

Kindle Comics (kindle_comics_clean.csv) — 343 titles

All Purchased. Western comics focus:

• Marvel — Hickman's House of X / Powers of X, A.X.E.: Judgment Day, Trial of Jean Grey, Guardians/X-Men crossovers
• DC — Red Hood and the Outlaws, various
• Star Trek — Discovery and others
• Manga adjacent — Appleseed / Masamune Shirow

Other Books (other/books_catalog.csv) — 552 PDFs

Stored on external SSD (/Volumes/Extreme SSD/dropbox/). Split into three categories:

• Reference Books (379) — bulk of the collection; publishers largely unknown
• Technical Books (155) — O'Reilly, No Starch Press, Pearson, Packt, Manning, Leanpub. Heavy software architecture focus: DDD, microservices, event-driven systems, micro-frontends, evolutionary architectures — a strong Neal Ford / O'Reilly orbit
• Art Books (18) — Deus Ex (Mankind Divided), CreatureBox sketchbooks, Horizon: Forbidden West cosplay guides, Jake Parker

TTRPG Catalog (other/ttrpg_catalog.csv) — 1,720 PDFs

Also on external SSD. Extremely broad collection organized by system:

Content type breakdown:

Notable indie/Kickstarter systems with significant coverage: Draco (35), Otherscape (32), So Many Robots (31), SHIFT RPG (24), Chronicles of Runes (16), Zaman's Guide (15), Moonsoon (14). The large Preview/Patreon counts suggest active crowdfunding support for RPG projects.

Visual Reference Archive — 667k+ images

Not a photo library — a concept art collection. Built up over years of browsing Twitter, Pinterest, and ArtStation, this archive is a curated visual vocabulary spanning SF, fantasy, cyberpunk, creature design, character art, and environmental worldbuilding. It lives on a 1TB iPhone Air and represents the same collecting impulse as the rest of the pile, just expressed visually.

The through-line is obvious in retrospect: the CreatureBox sketchbooks, the Deus Ex and Horizon art books, the Appleseed/Shirow manga, the D&D illustrated guides — the image archive is the same interest at a much larger scale. Concept art is the connective tissue between the worlds being read about, played in, and watched.

Physical Collection — Syd Mead Lithographs

The concept art interest extends into the physical world. Richard owns several original lithographs by Syd Mead — the industrial designer and visual futurist whose work defined the visual language of cinematic cyberpunk and hard SF (Blade Runner, TRON, Aliens, Johnny Mnemonic).

Three pieces in the collection:

• "The Running of the Six DRGXX" — signed by Mead, numbered 53/250. A low edition number on a signed work from the man who drew the future. A prize possession.
• "The Village Machine - LIFTOFF" — unsigned.
• "Sentinel" — giclée print, archival ink on 100% cotton rag, with Certificate of Authenticity from the Syd Mead archive.

Mead's aesthetic — machines that feel alive, purposeful, and already slightly worn-in — is a direct ancestor of the cyberpunk and SF visual vocabulary that runs through the rest of the collection.

Two physical books also worth noting:

• "Arcology: The City in the Image of Man" by Paolo Soleri (MIT Press) — a visionary architectural treatise on self-contained megastructure cities. As much concept art as urban theory; Soleri's dense, organic city illustrations are a direct visual ancestor of the built environments in Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Appleseed. A foundational SF worldbuilding artifact. Still browsed regularly — a working reference, not shelf decor.
• Appleseed manga by Masamune Shirow — collected in both the original Japanese and English translation. Owning both editions is a collector's move; this is studying the work, not just reading it. Shirow's mechanized city-states and bioroid society sit at the same intersection of technology, ecology, and politics that runs through the rest of the collection.

Movies — 500+ titles

Spread across multiple streaming services. Not yet cataloged in detail, but consistent with the broader SF/fantasy/action orientation of the collection.

Themes and Patterns

The collection is deeply genre-consistent across every medium. Military SF, cyberpunk, D&D-adjacent fiction, and software architecture dominate the reading pile. The TTRPG catalog is exceptionally broad with active crowdfunding support. The visual archive ties it all together — a 667k-image concept art library that reflects the same worldbuilding sensibility running through the books, games, and films.

At 2,743 Kindle titles alone, this is genuinely tsundoku-scale — the Japanese concept of acquiring books faster than you can read them. Extend that to every other medium and it's a portrait of someone who collects worlds.