On books

As a writer, and a part-time reader I, like so many others, love books.

There’s nothing better than a second-hand book store, or the book shelf in a charity shop, and sometimes, best of all. Sales.

I recently went to a bookseller here in the UK called Waterstones, and was delighted to find that they had three tables full of books for sale. Some of them were half-price, some of them were £5, £3 and some of them… were a whopping £1.

The best time to look at books, is when you have nothing else on your agenda. I’m really lucky in some ways that right now the last thing I need to be doing for myself is setting outrageous goals. That’s for another day (isn’t everything) though.

I think I picked up pretty much every book. If they weren’t £1 I put them down again.(I don’t have money for books right now!) Some I put back down right away because they just didn’t appeal to me, others I glanced at the blurb and set them back down, and there were a select few where I did that test – you know the one. The one where you read a few paragraphs and you’re supposed to work out by the second page whether it’s something you could keep reading or not.

Exactly five times I ended up at the end of the first chapter before I realised that not only was this definitely a book I needed to buy, but I probably needed to forget everything I’d just read because I have a SYSTEM when it comes to books. It’s like this.

HERE is a picture of the books at my bedside. These are the books I am currently reading.

IMG_0153

and then there’s a huge pile of books in my to-read pile.

IMG_0154

There’s a bigger question going on in my head right now, and the war I have with myself over it, whenever I start to think about it is pretty inconclusive every time.

What do I do with my books when I’m done with them!?

In my future, or as I like to say to a lot of my friends. “When I grow up, I want to have a house with a library and study.” In my head I have this gorgeous, perfectly lit room, with tall, second-hand bookshelves, a really comfy reading chair, and an incredibly well organised desk with an iMac and a twirly chair underneath it.

Sod the rest of it. I want a functional kitchen and a living room with a television and perhaps a PS4 (or PS10, whatever they’re on by the time I can afford something to call mine.) It’s my desperate dream to be well enough known author to live on writing alone, whether it be through book sales or free-lance work or something, idk.

ANYWAY. The problem comes at a certain point. As well as reading, and books, and writing I love BookCrossing

I absolutely love the idea of book crossing. There’s something great about knowing that you can ‘release’ a book somewhere and that someone else might enjoy it just as much as you did. Whilst I was in Melbourne, book crossing was the platform by which I discovered an amazing author, Bevan McGuiness, and without it I wouldn’t know the world of the triumvirate and that’s such a sad notion.

There’s a problem here though – and maybe you’ve noticed it yourself.

If I release these books in the wild once I’ve read them – I won’t have anything left on my shelf by the time I get those great big book shelves. Yeah, there are some books I just can’t part with. Through experience I’ve learnt that parting with my graphic novels is just a little too heart breaking, and of course there are books that particular people have bought for me that I just cannot part with. I’m a fan of getting friends to scribble a little note in the front page of books, even if it’s just the date and who gifted it to me.

Perhaps I’ll just have to be super selective about the books that I give away, but then I keep coming back to the bigger problem. What’s going to end up on my bookshelves?! I’m not even sure who my literary collection would be for. I have no intentions of having children of my own, but of course that’s not to say I won’t be that awesome ‘Auntie’ Ollie with the awesome library in her weird little house?

When I’m rich and famous maybe I’ll just be able to buy every book I’ve ever wanted, but where’s the fun in a collection that hasn’t travelled the world with you, or been carefully put together over time?

Clearly, there are just too many difficult decisions to make in life!

Advertisements

3 comments on “On books

  1. Lyt Hodson says:

    If I was you I would do two things. 1) Your first idea to release into the wild. This is for all books that you have read and enjoyed to some degree. 2) Books that you know you will definitely read again and again. Keep them all ready for your amazing library that I know you will get one day. XX

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Sasha Cohen says:

    I have a book to add to this! I have been struggling with personal issues for 10 years and have found reaching out online to seek the advice of others has helped me through the good and bad time. I have always had relationship issues and have started to follow the advice of Dr. Robi Ludwig. I saw her on a tv show once and I really appreciated her take on current psychological issues. She has written two books but my favorite book is with Your Best Age is Now I have read it and loved it! I highly recommend it to anyone out there struggling.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

w

Connecting to %s
https://notjustdepression.com/2016/02/24/on-books/
notjustdepression.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-34
69600
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6YT7D6NRJZ72KOLMRPIQ6ZESIZNT3G3X
<urn:uuid:9fa9ae9d-5564-4dc8-a86f-d901cada5424>
2018-08-14T23:17:35Z
192.0.78.25
text/html
sha1:GENCOB4PLFEFD5H6WKOILSZFIQWFGYIZ
<urn:uuid:6da2eb9f-0c7d-4b9b-b964-e2a4d6bb5ad8>
https://notjustdepression.com/2016/02/24/on-books/
response
<urn:uuid:8353fbd3-4fc2-44cf-9d7a-fdc7c17235ad>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-34
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-31-69-36.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/