by Lauren
The ever entertaining Laura at Combreviations was inspired by a Guardian blog entry to recount her year of not buying books: a year in which money woes meant reading all the books she already had. The horror!I'm a pack rat perpetually lured by the siren song of materialism to own an awful lot of things that I don't, perhaps, need to permanently possess. I rarely get rid of books I've read and dislike. I get a bit twitchy when items loaned out don't get returned, even if I don't have any need for them back. And if I love it, I simply must give it pride of place.
I certainly don't want people to stop buying books simply because they don't need to (if they did, how on earth would I make money to buy all the books I want to buy?), but I am sometimes alarmed by the sheer percentage of books in the teetering piles that I have not and, let's face it, will not ever read.
When this happens, though, I just resolve to read twice as much, to continue to justify my spending. And with a weekend of rain and a day's wait for the cable guy looming on the horizon, it's nice to have the reminder to aggressively get through at least something the next few days to make room on the to-be-read pile for the six recent purchases threatening to fall off my desk here before I get them home.
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Oh boy, do I undestand what you're talking about. I'm about to do an international move and so I've had to cull SOME books from my pile. It hurt. A lot. I guess it just means I'll need to add new ones when I get to the new destination. :-)
ReplyDeleteNobody expects adults to play with all the collectibles they buy. As an author, I believe we need to get rid of the expectation that people should only buy the books they have time to read.
ReplyDeleteThey are much easier to shelve and dust than most collectibles, and need to be marketed to people who don't actually have time to read.
Good for you! If we could get all the people wasting money on useless collectible stuffed toys and dust gathering ceramics to act like you, literature would have a new rennasiance!
ReplyDeleteOops, accident because I thought my original comment wasn't posted, not a sock puppet.
ReplyDelete