more than enough
I make a real effort to keep the house free of clutter and I'm generally fairly successful. I have a certain number of decorative objects arranged in each room and I resist the urge to add to them. I'm pretty ruthless about giving or throwing away things I don't need or use -- or at least putting them in the cellar so I don't have to look at them. But there's one area in which I've completely failed in my self-imposed task. Books are everywhere. Books have taken over the house.
Granted, they're all lined up on shelves, but the shelves overwhelm almost every room. In the guest room, where I'm sitting now, are two bookshelves filled entirely with art books -- big, thick books with brightly colored dust jackets. The books L uses for work are in the study, which is lined on three sides with shelves that go up to the ceiling. All our fiction, including a large collection of French detective stories that we inherited from L's mother, is on two narrow bookcases that flank the second floor landing. And I haven't even mentioned the books in the bedroom or the junk room or the cellar.
They seem to generate spontaneously, like aphids from dew or mice from river mud. If I look away, another set of volumes appears -- books about medieval history or psychology or film noir, carefully grouped together; books in languages that neither of us can read. I wander through the house as if it were a library, pulling down books at random and paging through them, continually astonished by what I find.
12 comments:
Niobe...sounds like our place. There are books everywhere. When I go into people's homes it is one thing I seem to notice - books or no books. I think it says something about a person - and like many things that can be interpeted differently :)
Sounds like heaven to me. I am slowly trying to convert S to the way of books so I don't have as many as you but I'm working on it.
Lee, Caro: It's decidedly a mixed blessing. They're pretty to look at and it's nice to have so many to choose from, but I wonder if anyone will ever read them all.
This thoroughly amuses me, because one of the first comments you made on my blog was this: "Is there an option for expressing the opinion that books are massively overrated and something that I would never willingly allow to darken my doorstep (let alone any other part of my house)?"
My house is not (yet) overrun with books, because we have no bookcases. I've been whining about doing built-ins (wall to wall, to the ceiling) on two sides of one room. Until then, the vast majority of the books are in boxes in the cellar. I miss them. The only ones out and about are cookbooks, gardening books, children's books, and whatever's arrived since we moved in nearly three years ago.
This is why I entered all my books in Library Thing. I'm still astonished by what I own, but now I'm just slightly less likely to buy duplicates.
(We also have a bookshelf on the landing. Oy.)
I just wrote a comment so long I decided to make it a post on my site. Needless to say, we are also overrun by books. None, however, are exclusively in a language that neither of us reads. I wonder how you picked those up?
I don't feel overrun by books, but that is probably because there are places in the house where there are no books, or no adult books. When I was growing up, in our very small apartment in the Old Country, there was nowhere to look and not see books. Well, almost-- there weren't any in the small kitchen we had. So now, since there are walls I can look at and not see books, I don't feel overrun.
Phantom L buys duplicates (and triplicates for that matter) entirely on purpose.
Magpie That's very funny. I had completely forgotten that comment. I really do have a love/hate relationship with the books.
S Well, at least it gives me an incentive to learn Norwegian.
Norwegian!
This is so funny. I have the same problem with books too. I can't get rid of them...not one single one. And I have a ton of art books too (lots of art history courses). I love them and I actually look at them quite frequently. Though they are the only ones I look at a lot!
We go through cycles here with books...binging and purging (although the purging has only happened once or twice). Mostly it is Mr. C that does the book binging. Years ago it was trips to used book stores or Half Priced Books. But now he goes on-line and then we have packages that arrive every day or so for a while.
Our collection holds very little fiction, however.
I do have this problem myself, usually. Not right now, though -- all the books are on the 3rd floor, we have not brought them down yet. I have clue where to put them all. I would leave them there and quickly fill the whole apartment if i could afford to not rent it out.
I love my living space, so spacious since it is currently empty of any books except those that are actually being read. But i cannot give up the damned things.
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