Why do you keep so many books (if you do)?

BUT!

1) I really like they way they look when they are all on display together. It just pleases me.

2) I do occasionally go and look something up - or not even so much look something else as just think "I want to look at that particular picture (I have a lot of art books) and then have to drag it out.

3) Lugging them from flat to flat, putting them in storage and taking them out again... wow! Every time I do it, it's like I just discovered a whole new set of books! Like a trip to a library I already own. It brings me joy to rediscover something I'd forgotten I had.

4) Did I meantion I really really like they way they look? Especially the big art ones, and the Folio Society ones with the gold type on the binding.

Like, that is all the knowledge that I have aquired.

Yes, all those I'm *definitely* keeping. I have six overstuffed bookcases at present, and I know I could narrow it down to three without trying.

That said what I think I'll do is wait for the inevitable next move, whenever that is. For now, as M. indicates, they are good for furnishing.

Hmmmmmmmmm, you sure about that?

Kate giving all the secret answers from inside my head. I hate parting with books, but it's getting daft here. There are piles in every room, in the cupboards, in boxes, in costly storage even!

Hmmmmmmmmm, you sure about that?
Well, no, not really. But the ones I keep mostly-unread because "some day I might need to know everything about Scottish Freemasonry and Trade Unionism 1862-1904" are surely better served by just never needing to know everything about SFaTU1-1

Walter Benjamin to thread? (There was also a great essay I read somewhere about the Victorian-era middle-class ideal of 'the home library,' as a natural product of increased literacy combined with ideals of culture, education, etc. In part we are attached to our home libraries because we've been socialized to feel just that.)

because just by looking at a book on the shelf, I can remember so much about the pleasure of reading it.

Andrew Eldritch once said that about his favorite records' spines! And, tellingly, went on to say that he hadn't listened to those records in years upon years.

I'm trying at the moment (unsuccessfully) to simply stop bringing quite so many into the house. I'm only allowed to go to bookshops once a month, just after payday. I'm not allowed in other bookshops unless I'm specifically looking for something. Must throw away the Folio Society catalogues after I've read them. Not allowed UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES to order them online.

...and then I slip up and do something stupid like go into the Tate through the bookshop entrance and I come home with another half dozen. :-(

While it's nice to have easy access to online dictionaries, isn't it way more satisfying to look up the word in a big giant book yourself?

cos im insane.

1: Books I Have Not Read Yet But Definitely Will (most of the books I read in 2006 were from this category, though I still haven't finished Proust and am not sure I'll ever bother with Joyce)

2: Books I have read and loved and will definitely read again. My memory's not so great -- I won't forget the entirety of a book, but I'll probably forget characters' names, minor subplots, etc. Enough to make a lot of books worth rereading, and I read often enough that I'm not cheating myself out of reading other books.

3: Books I have read and anticipate lending to other people.

4: Books I need for work. A large number of the books I got rid of used to fall into this category, because academics hoard a lot of books that have some tangential enough connection to what they do that they may benefit from it some day. Now my only research-related work is fiction writing and "independent scholarship," and I have pretty decent subject control over both, so if I don't keep books about the French Revolution and Puritan theology, it's cause I don't frickin want to write about them. (I still had a hundred or two books hanging around from undergraduate days, too -- I don't anticipate doing French verb drills any time sooner than quarter-to-fuck-that.) By the same token, all my almas mater have finally cancelled my computer accounts, and I no longer have access to JSTOR -- so the books I kept, I really needed to keep.

5: Books I have read and may or may not read again but fit some reasonable completism: if I have books in a series, I'll keep all of them if I keep any. I got rid of LOTS of these, though, realizing that I've read -- for instance -- Foundation enough times now that in the unlikely event I ever need to read it again, I can just spend the three bucks at a used bookstore to pick it up, and it's far less likely that I'll decide to read the later sequels.

Some of my hoarding tendencies were holdovers from when I was a kid in a town with a library small enough that I'd read all the books in the children's/young adult section, so my options were often between rereading and not reading at all.

I wonder if this will ever post or if I'll just keep cycling through the new messages showing up while I'm reading the other new messages that showed up while I was reading the other ones before that.

splutter

i like looking at books.

6. Books I've read half or three-quarters of the way thru but which I intend sitting down and reading all of one of these days!

For me I think the corner was turned last time I moved, when I got rid of about a third of the books I owned. There simply wasn't the physical space for them and I'll be damned if I ever pay for separate storage elsewhere. The end result was remarkably freeing, so this could explain why my attitude on this is a lot different from everyone else's here so far! (Also, like my CDs I've sold on, I've not yet felt an impulse to reread what I'd given away.)

I'm actually quite pleased that so many people here lend out their books! If nothing else you are indeed treating it as an actual home library in that sense.

I'm actually with Tep. (I liked Portrait and Dubliners and all...)

Also because someday either I will have children or my siblings will, and I have a library all ready-made for them to build their hearts from

I was actually just thinking about that with reference to my upbringing. I'd say I looked through a few of my folks' books over the years, but not as many as might be guessed (mostly I was looking through my own!). And I have no real idea if I'll ever have kids or not -- as my sister doesn't either, my mom buys books for our cousins' kids instead.

were you a sarah records recording artist?

yeh a good quarter of my books are for this reason; an author, a single page, a theme, even a phrase, that connects with other books in my collection and thus i must buy it. Now post-google i shrug and put it down.

Btw my estimate above is extremely conservative, it's more like 30 thou +

* I should put a moritorium on buying new books until I've read a more significant portion of the ones I've gotten the last two years and my reading time was significantly dented.

I only wound up with an English degree because those were the credits that added up before anything else caught up -- I've never been invested in a canon or anything, so any time I pick up Joyce (other than Dubliners, which I've read) I have the same reaction I had to reading Catcher in the Rye in my 20s instead of in my teens when I should have: the sense of a ship having sailed, because too much seems over-familiar from having read the things that it influenced. Had I got to it sooner, I'd probably love Ulysses, but I just don't think there's world enough and time for me to ever get around to it now.

Scott, I know, I try to keep the twee under control but then I start thinking about books and kids and transcendence and I start crying at work and I really oughtn't to be allowed out some days.

Tep's childhood thing rings a bell -- I had way more books than my small-town library had back then. And the thought of one day having kids, it'd be great to have more books in the house for them than I had available -- about six.

That crosses my mind more than once (though I'm thinking much more in the very long term). I think it will be interesting to see how the concept of what is needed in physical space in the home plays out more and more as the Internet is more entrenched. What could have been room set aside for physical intellectual products will become something else for many people.

But Raggetude, you're so nice about Joyce on amg

I am, it's a nice disc. I might finally read all of Ulysses instead of just the bits and pieces I have; maybe one day I'll finally read all of the Bible as well. As I can't get around to everything I'll enjoy what I can as I go.

I love this idea; it is beautifully put.

I didn't have a lot of books when I was little (just Mom's box of old Nancy Drews and Cherry Ames, etc.) and I didn't have a lot of guidance as to what would be good to read. Contrast that to my husband, who grew up surrounded by books and who didn't have a tv growing up, and I have a continual conversation in my life of, "what you've never read that? REALLY?" So I love buying stuff for the kids and having A.'s input on what they will love - plus I finally get to enjoy it myself.

This is how my cousins were raised. I remember being befuddled by that when we were young! They're not doing that for their own kids, FWIW -- don't blame them at all.

Also, selling them on Amazon = cash for other things = great. And it somehow eats into my messing around on the internet time, rather than my work time, so it's like a 2nd job which reduces the amount of crap I own.

On the other hand, I suspect that I own 100s of books that I will be completely unable to make myself get rid of (and that's excluding the maths books).

That being said books >>>>>>>> tv (to the nth power)

a) I like owning a lot of books
b) It means I'm always going to have something to read
c) Who in their right mind gives away their books, unless they have to?

Which you make up for by writing, so it all even out.

(But no, I wouldn't give my tv up either... I like even some of the dumbest stuff on it. Trust me when I say this; I still occasionally watch the soaps that I watched as a kid!!!)

As for being book deprived, don't feel bad for me; now I am Totally Not. Plus my 8 year old is a much better reader than his nephew is, which I'm pretty sure has something to do with the fact that I keep all these books around and my sister doesn't (so I get to feel superior, and who doesn't secretly love that?!)

Lately all I want to do is let my kids watch tv, but they are both sick and driving me nuts right now. If I didn't have the tv (and the computer), I'd be locking myself in the bathroom to hide. With a book, probably.

The surprising thing (or not?) is that it led to me loving awesome literature, too.

and yet i'll take my gazillion books over my gazillion records any day when it comes to moving.

Likewise, though my father kept mentioning the possibility of forbidding certain comic books etc, and I was part of the generation-within-a-generation that wasn't allowed to play Dungeons and Dragons.

I believe in limiting and to some extent supervising television intake, depending on the kid's age (though I think it's key for children to enjoy things their parents find stupid), just not in doing so in favor of reading (past the age of "practice makes perfect"). Especially these days. My parents tried it at one point, but I was reading hundreds of books anyway and my brother has a learning disability, so a uniform policy was too tough to cobble together.

(My parents don't read, watch TV, watch movies, or listen to music, so in this case this stuff all came out of my father's suspicion of Evil Influence and my mother's New England eyebrow-raising at anything that Doesn't Serve Some Practical End.)

2. Continued lust from an adolescence of looking into Manhattan brownstones where the walls were lined with endless curious tomes.

3. A tendency towards obscurer reading, and a tendency towards only buying things on sale, meaning if there's any chance I'll want to read a book someday, and I find it cheap enough, I'll grab it, because when that day comes, I will not be able to find it again.

Um. What exactly do they do for spare time?

My mother quilts and plays bridge, and town politics are sort of a spectator sport here. Sometimes she knits sweaters for upcoming birthdays. Bridge is kind of an indulgence, but it doesn't cost any money -- she's horrified at the number of movies I own. My father, well, he's got his own recreations. (He's Very Religious, along Pat Robertson type lines.)

I keep the ones I keep because I like having them to open and read from. About 160 of them are volumes of poetry. About fifty are various reference works. The rest are just damn good books.

this is pretty much the reason why i have so little vinyl. freaks me out. feel like i need more stability for me n vinyl to happen.

I have kept a running list of every book I've read since January of 1992. Seriously! This may seem obsessive, but sometimes I'll think of something from a book but won't remember where it came from - or need to figure out a title or author - and it really helps.

(I also have a running list of books I want to read, but that is so out of hand that it should never be discussed.)