Yes I realize this is an old post. I’m reading back.

Hope it helps 🙂

I’m sure I’ll continue to horde books until I have no room left. I have already resorted to stacking them in piles against the walls as I have ran out of all available shelf space!

This essay by Christopher Hitchens really resonated, though my own collection wouldn’t be a patch on Hitchens. I wish!

“I am utterly miserly about letting any of my books out of my sight.” Could’ve been writing about me :/

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_diarist.html

I will keep around cookbooks, but if I realize there’s only 2 recipes in the book I actually use I’ll take a photo of them and email it to myself, OR photocopy it and put it in my recipe binder.

Everyone at the library got aggravated with my borrowing habits (at the time I thought the book limit was invented for me) and I bought books used the very age I had spending money of my own. It’s all piled up. One day, someone decided to go into my room to relieve me of some of my “children’s literature” for a book drive, since I was too old for it, and I think I was angry about it for months.

I’ve had to travel for work and visiting family ever since, and while it used to be funny to bring 10+ books on any trip, it got really annoying to lug around. Someone gave me an ereader and I turned up my nose at it. I liked BOOKS, not just the words on the pages, but the folded over pages and the binding that was falling apart.

It’s become a necessity. I started giving away hard copies of my books ever since (a 1,000+ collection now down to, I think, somewhere in the low 300s, most of that in storage. I don’t want to count.)

One thing I thought about is what you wrote here, whether I kept some of the books because if anyone came into my room to visit, or the police after I was murdered or something, there’d be some clues about the person I was — the person I wanted people to think I was — all over the place. I hate my life sometimes but love the world that’s described in books, and that’s what I want people to remember of me, is that total of everything I’ve read. That IS me. Those are the words that go through my mind every second of every day.

And sometimes I admit I would read in public and hope that someone with similar tastes saw the title and came up to talk to me about the field or simply approve, even if no one ever said anything.

How ridiculous. I was so ashamed that I see using my ereader as an atonement. I’ve downloaded a lot of those children’s books to read when I am regressing, a lot of the “classics” for free, and other books from places all over. I’ve also paid too much for nonfiction that I can’t find anywhere else and I’m too impatient to pick up on an ILL. And the words are still there but I’m not showing off anymore or pretentiously building monuments in my bedroom, in the living room, even the bathroom. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Now I get mad when people who come visit and think I don’t read. I keep reference books and dictionaries around too, how USEFUL AND BORING visually.

Oh well. You never win. Thanks for a great entry, Sister. It’ll be there in my memory with the other words.