Confessions of a book hoarder…
Most everyone has seen videos or visited old houses’ moldy smelling libraries or studies with their old desks and floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with old books. Whether the titles there are just for show or actually have been read, such rooms give a house a lot of character. In our case, our study is a third bedroom filled with two work tables, our laptops atop and printers on the side, and yes, floor-to-ceiling bookcases along one wall and smaller bookcases in back of the office chairs.
We’ve had a similar setup for years wherever we’ve lived, but it came to a point where the bookcases, loaded with so many books, began to have shelves that sagged. Ebooks were invented just in time to save the situation, though. We still have too many hardbound and paperback books—most of the latter form my collection of sci-fi classics—but we’ve also given a lot of those away for charity and school book sales because my Kindle’s cloud does a great job of archiving old ebooks I’ve read (sometimes a few times for various reasons) and new ebooks I intend to read.
I’ve always been a voracious reader. (I don’t have much respect for an author who isn’t, unless they have some disability.) Long before ebooks and before I could afford to buy many books (back in the third or fourth grade!), I was reading adventure (now called thriller), mystery and crime (for example, Christie), and sci-fi stories (for example, Asimov, Clark, and Heinlein), I was a weekly visitor to the public library downtown (thanks to mom). I inherited my older brother’s sci-fi collection when he went off to college (all hardbound books from some sci-fi book club) and began to make my own paperback purchases, so the books started accumulating. My many years as a book hoarder began, only interrupted by moves across the west to east coast of the US and back a few times, and back and forth to Colombia, for school and work.
For other things, I’m not a hoarder; and the only things competing with books has been sheet music, CDs, and LPs. Almost all books on my Kindle are fiction (there are a few mostly worthless ones on book marketing that I perused when I started to publish). In my bookcases, you’ll find textbooks, reference works, and a few hardbound and paperback fiction book that survived my purge when ebooks appeared. Even with that purge, I still dread any future moves!
I rarely reread others’ fiction so only sentimental attachment makes me keep their books around, but I sometimes reread or scan my own creations when I’m writing the next book in a series or some story related to previously published works (mostly for fear of being repetitive with plots and themes).
But the books I have at hand either in my bookshelves or on my Kindle are mostly old and valued friends, so maybe I’ll revisit them more as I become a doddering old fool whose memory is going. These old friends have kept me sane throughout my life (especially during the Covid pandemic); I hope they continue to do that.
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
