My friendly colleague Dan recently wrote about why he bought an e-reader on his excellent and thoughtful blog. It got me pondering my own relationship with books and how that's getting a bit out of control.
In the last two months I have bought ten books (for a grand total of £9.50) and read one. As that book (Simon Goddard's The Smiths:Songs That Saved Your Life) was so good I'm going to keep it as I may need to refer to it in the future. It's clear that this approach is not sustainable from a space point of view.
Those ten books join a pile of 40 or 50 I have already got lined up to read. At my current rate of progression that is seven or eight years before I read them all. But there will also be books I don't know about that I want to read and books that haven't been conceived yet that will also be added to the pile.
Part of the problem is what Jarvis Cocker would call a 'thirst for knowledge' that I have developed over the past few years. My reading has moved away from fiction (I still want to get stuck into Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes at some point though) and more into the history and biography space.
Modern fiction can be read and handed on much easier or given away if it's no good. History needs to be kept, preserved for future generations. Mrs Co-ordinator owns a French almanac from 1789. It must have been printed before the French revolution. When that book was printed the world was a very different place. It is a time machine of sorts.
On a smaller scale I have old football books from 40 plus years ago. These need to survive so future generations realise that football wasn't invented in 1992 as some people will tell you. Surely we wouldn't want to forget that Franz Beckenbauer's mother-in-law ran his fan club, that the first time Don Rogers went on a train it was on the way to sign for Swindon or that Mike Pejic's dad ran a farm in Yugoslavia.
If this was Me versus Books then books would be winning hands down. I could go on but that 900 page biography of Oliver Cromwell won't read itself.
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