My Relentless Acquisition of Books (and selling them for food)

I bloody love books. I have always bloody loved books. When I die, hopefully sixty-plus years from now, my headstone will happily read some kind of variant on my existing name and

‘Here she rests. She bloody loved books.’

My Penguin clothbound classics are amongst my favourite possessions in the world. I have a mere twenty-nine of them from the full collection of I think about one hundred. I have spreadsheet – yes, it’s a free country, a spreadsheet, we’re all friends here – of all the books I have and all the books I want. I’ve written a will already because my lifestyle is disgraceful and have decided to leave all my books to my friend Ryan who also bloody loves books and his wife is not happy.

My favourite book as a child was Dancing Daisy and I have it in a box of books I have collected for my future children. When I feel like I should get rid of my enormous history collection – biographies of everyone and everything from the city of Jerusalem to Sir Thomas More to Malala Yousafzai, I think, well, the kids might need them for homework in a decade or so’s time. And also they’re fantastic. I’ve read them all, and when I have time, I’ll read them again.

I also have a plastic crate of paperback fiction I’ve obtained over the years under my bed, which is my current ‘To Be Read’ list. I have original hardback Harry Potters that I bought in the nineties as they came out, that are all sun-bleached and battered up and I love them. I’ve recently bought a new boxed collection – for the kids. I’ll read my own. When I was very little, my Grandad bought me an illustrated children’s bible which I absolutely treasured, and when he died, I inherited his own bibles as well. They sit on the same bookshelf as the Penguins, on the bottom shelf, next to the Collected Works of Shakespeare he bought me as a ‘congratulations on four As at A-Level despite everything’ present when I left for University.

My books are pieces of history. In some cases – like my Great Uncle Henry’s book ‘The Story of London’ – I mean that literally. His parents filled the front page with stamps from the mid-1930s and wrote an inscription, referring to ‘The Great War’ and wishing him a happy third birthday. Little did they know that war would come again less than five years from their time of writing, and Henry would be orphaned a mere fifteen years from then.

Other books, like my Christopher Ricks edited ‘Inventions of the March Hare’ that formed the basis of my undergraduate thesis, was carried around with me endless and treated like a fifth limb during the winter and spring of 2012. Sitting beside it is another T.S. Eliotcollection, bought for me as a Thank You present from my now-fiancé, when he was merely a friend. The stories have stories. Imagine that.

Sadly, in times of extreme poverty when as many of my clothes as I could spare had been sold for money for the electric meter, I put together three boxes of books for Music Magpie to enable me to eat. I suppose it was the modern-day equivalent of the starving artist burning his manuscripts for heating in Dickens’ England. It wasn’t good and I missed them, especially when one considers the cost of a paperback is about £8.99 and Music Magpie bought them off me for 20p if I was lucky. Once the £35 I got for all my books was effectively eaten, I had no idea what I was going to do then.

But that time is over now, and the loft is once again full of books, as is the lounge, under the bed, the unit next to my side of the bed, and the desk in our spare room that has served as a home office since April last year. I get annoyed with my fiancé for leaving ‘piles of things’ everywhere and when I have a good look, I do it too – with piles of books.

When I think about what it is I love about my books, and why I have refused to get a Kindle or any of these other ‘e-reader’ things that make me feel both violently ill and a thousand years old, I conclude that books are the only things in my current modern life that I cannot rush. It simply cannot be done. I read quickly, of course – advanced degrees in Literature do tend to do that to you – but I cannot race through them in the same way that I put a TV programme on and work at the same time, because who has got the time to just focus on one thing anymore? Certainly not me. I like how much room they take up. They’re the last things that still do, what with streaming making mine and Bradley’s combined DVD and CD collections vastly obsolete. They take up space in the world that they are more than entitled to, that we rarely give to anything anymore. I like the weight of them in my hands, and that I need both hands to read them properly. I don’t have a hand free for my iPhone – and thank God for that.

We are blessed to be born into a literate country where learning to read is one of the first things we ever do and is paramount to our education. As such, I have finally - at almost thirty years of age – written my own book, which I hope will be shared with the world soonenough. As Roald Dahl said, “If you are going to get anywhere in life, you will have to read alot of books.” He kindly invented Matilda, a child genius with a love of reading to inspire us all.

Here’s to World Book Day, and getting anywhere in life.