I do like a good book. So much, in fact, that there is simply not enough room in the house for the ones I already have, despite having donated an industrial amount of books I have read to the truly great Thornbury Lions bookshop which is, you may be surprised to hear, in Thornbury. I dread to think how many unread books I have scattered throughout the house but what I found truly shocking was just how many books I have on my various Amazon shopping and wish lists. 19. This, I put it to you, is getting ridiculous.
The main problem is me. Despite living in the digital world, with all the new-fangled gadgets like computers, mobile phones, smart TVs and the like, when it comes to some things, I cannot shake off the past. As with the music I buy, I like hard copies of books and all the clutter that brings.
My partner despairs. She has a Kindle and scuttles through books at a rapid rate of knots and in any case is a far more organised and clutter-free person, so I am the subject of much derision when music and book parcels keep arriving. “Where are we going to put it all?” she asks, rhetorically, knowing that there is no satisfactory solution. The thing is my music and book collections are not so much a hobby but an obsession.
With books, I love the look and feel of them. While a book appears on a Kindle (other devices are available, if you like that kind of thing) in word form, you simply can’t call it a book. Yet I have changed in some ways.
I have transferred almost all my music to computers and my phone and the latter is how I listen to most of it. 30-odd years ago, I would take a Walkman (ask your parents, kids) on holiday and as many cassettes as I could fit in my luggage. Now, I have a device with around 20,000 songs on it which I play via some ‘ear pods’ or a small bluetooth speaker. I wouldn’t change it for the world and go back to the days of the Walkman, but note that I have not gone the whole hog and abandoned ‘hard’ copies of music altogether. On the contrary, I buy more than ever. Why can’t I do this with books (PLEASE, comes a voice from the next room)? The explanation is simple: I just can’t.
I speak as someone whose phone is pretty well surgically attached to my hands for most of the time. Mine has become not just my music outlet, but also my bank, my weather forecast, my plane spotting device, my NHS point of access – oh, do I really need to explain further? You’ve got the gist.
I do get the odd pang of jealousy when my partner is on her holiday sun bed, effortlessly reading her Kindle while I am wrestling with a book, a bookmark, turning pages every five minutes, struggling to get comfortable, yet that is the experience I like. Even though we probably need to pay for extra luggage for every flight – I have to take too many books because of the fear of running out a thousand or so miles from home – I regard it as worth the cost and effort.
I suspect only a serious bookworm would understand the obsession with proper books, which frankly ignores logic and commonsense, and I fear it is not going to change. The fact that several years ago I finally gave up reading physical newspapers has made no difference to my love of books. Mind you, I thought I would struggle to give up the joy of a paper newspaper, but actually it was very easy. It was only a habit and I broke it within days and don’t miss it at all. It is entirely possible that the same thing would happen if I stopped reading actual books and acquired a Kindle, but in all honesty I have so many books at home that it’s really not worth finding out.
I am currently reading Ban This Filth: Mary Whitehouse and the battle to keep Britain innocent by Ben Thompson and it’s hysterically funny. I am sure it would be just as funny on a tablet or whatever, but that, for me, is not an option and I suspect never will be.
Yes, I love a good book. And the clutter is not going to end anytime soon.
