Thank goodness for books. Real, physical books, with covers and pages and that lovely smell that only comes from within the pages of a real book.
You may have guessed from those two sentences that I am a dyed-in-the-wool reader and have been since I was very young. I escaped into a literary adventure whenever I could. I enjoy a good scary book, love crime fiction and a good mystery and once I have finished reading a book, I tend to keep it because I can pick it up and read it again a few years down the track and enjoy it as much as I did the first time around. So yes, I’m a book person.
Which is why I have far more books than I do shelves to put them on. This could create an issue with my tendency towards neat-freakness but a book lover can always find a way around something like that. I have. I have learned to make neat stacks and place them at points around my living space where they can be on hand, but unobtrusively so. And they are very, very neat stacks, in no danger of toppling over. It works. But why am I bothering to talk about it?
Because some person, obviously not a true Book Person, suggested I should toss most of my collection into the recycling bin and move onto ebooks. You know, get a tablet and just download a new book whenever I need one. Well that would be quite often as I’m onto a new book every week or so, which is why the two dozen unread books in my lounge room are stacked neatly in four piles on the coffee table, because it puts them close to the lounge where I curl up to devour them. And they look good just sitting there. Enough to raise the pulse of an ardent reader like me.
Which is why I am relieved that physical books haven’t vanished altogether with the advent of ebooks. It’s something I am hoping will never happen, because a screen read has nothing on holding a real book in your hands, feeling the weight of it, hearing the pages turn and inhaling that book smell.
Going by the look on their face, I’m guessing the non-book person was having trouble relating to all the things I claimed to enjoy from reading an actual book and I could tell we were not on the same page when it came down to it. But I could have all these books in the one place, they countered, on something the size of ONE book!!!
Well where’s the fun in that? I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling from seeing all my books! I like to go along the shelf and choose a title, or run a finger down the stacks I have around the place. What I don’t think I’d get a single kick out of would be picking up a device and scrolling through titles. There are no jackets, no colours and no cover design with an outline on the back to set the scene. It is just a list of titles. Okay, maybe there’s an outline beneath the title of an ebook but I don’t believe for a moment that swiping a screen is in any way comparable to turning a page.
Which is why I like real books. It is also why I need to look for a bigger place, preferably one with plenty of wall space for bookshelves because, eventually, no matter how neatly I stack them as I get them, a lounge room with more books than furniture and floorspace is going to be a challenge to live with.
Unless I get rid of some of the furniture.