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Thank Goodness for Books

Lucky I’m an avid reader. I will go through a novel a week, sometimes two, and it’s just as well because with all the social distancing and restrictions on travel, my games of Memory, Scrabble and Monopoly are spending a lot of time on the shelf under the telly.

Not gathering dust though. One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of is cleaning. Not that I don’t normally clean, because I do, I don’t like a messy space, but when a lot of other activities are off the agenda and I’m not into daytime TV, doing an almost daily whiz around with the cloth and the vacuum  etc has become my newest normal. But at night I like to read.

And it’s just as well because my fellow players (my kids) and I can’t get together to play those games nearly often enough because of the restrictions in place to keep us safe from The Bug. And it’s killing us! Like, we’ve been known to sit up until the wee small hours with a family game, or six, and we did it regularly, when family visits could be a lot more regular. And we had the best time ever going hammer and tongs on each other in a close match.

We are mad keen Scrabblers  and get the kind of close scores that lead to “revenge” matches, one after the other after the other, then a cuppa break, and then another game, it’s great! It’s the same with Memory and as for Monopoly, it’s just open slather when we all get together over the Monopoly board.  Everyone wants Mayfair and Park Lane and once we set everything up…it’s on!

But as I mentioned, playing regularly is not happening at the moment, and attempting to play on my own, well take it from me, it doesn’t quite work. Hence books.

The beauty of a good book is that it will grab your attention from the first page and keep you happily occupied until the last. You can read a book on your own. The joy you get from a book is as good as landing on Mayfair when you already have Park Lane, and have enough money left over to put a house on each and the other players just keep landing on them…

Books even take precedence over social media with me. I love crime fiction, mystery and a good creepy story and right now I have a hot selection in several piles sitting on the coffee table (thank goodness for the local op shop) so I am one happy woman! So I am very thankful that I’m a big reader or I’d be going crackers about now because one can only take so many walks, read so many newspapers and make so many batches of biscuits and meringues. The plants have been repotted, the wisteria trimmed and, well, the house got dusted to within an inch of it’s life. Again.  I didn’t vacuum though. I showed a bit of restraint there because it was only done yesterday.

I’ll just do it tomorrow.

 

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Real Book vs eBook

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.