It was this or a bigger house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading

I have all the books.

Wait.

I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”

I have all the books. Do you understand?

And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.

This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.

So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:

along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.

We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.

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6 thoughts on “It was this or a bigger house”

    1. There are probably at least twenty bankers’ boxes full of books in the basement, and in fact I finally packed up a bunch of books by a transphobe and a sex pest right before taking these pictures. I haven’t gotten rid of many, though.

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  4. I swear, I’d comment more often if WordPress stopped eating my paragraphs. Grr. 

    My backstory needs a post of its own anyway. 

    Suffice it to say that, over ten years ago, for very sound reasons at the time, I donated 90% of my books and started throwing substantial money at Amazon for Kindle books. 

    I came to regret that at a visceral level, and am back up to three large bookcases and growing fast, in an apartment under 700 square feet. 

    At some point, my boyfriend and I will combine households and my growing book collection will join his growing personal library. He has one of those rambling century-old houses that’s been added onto half a dozen times and whole rooms are inhospitable to bookcases and still every room in the house has books except the dining room and the bathrooms. 

    The children think we’re joking when we say we may have to start replacing children with books. Two of his kids are still at home and one turns 17 next month so… time to start measuring walls, perhaps?

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