I may have more books than I need...

I recently filled in a questionnaire about my book-related habits. I had to estimate how many books I owned, read a year, that sort of thing. Pretty straightforward. So I made a conservative estimate of how many books I own. There's quite a few in the study. There's a wall in the dining room, a few shelves in the living room, more in the bedroom, the entire Terry Pratchett collection on the landing...OMG. Is two and half thousand books a bit much?  

Novels

The problem is, the kids are not entirely book-free either - that's another thousand books...and the husband isn't without a few metres of bookshelves of his own. No wonder the house creaks a bit in windy weather, it's probably about to fall down.


Writing, poetry, literature

Then they wanted to know things like how many books do you read a year. Actually, I've slowed down enormously, from two a day at my most prolific (when the kids were small) to less than one a day. I do read ridiculously fast, and I don't get as much detail out of books as some readers, which is fine because chances are, I'll read them again. And again. I own dozens of books I've read more than ten times, they are the ones looking sorry for themselves.

Non-fiction and work

Which raises the issue of the possibility of a Kindle. As soon as I sent the book over to the agent, she 'stuck it on the Kindle' so she could carry it around with her. What a brilliant idea! Think how many trees would be saved, not just in making the books but in building the many many bookshelves. On the other hand, my house would never end up looking like a secondhand bookshop!

Not to mention that most of my books were secondhand when I bought them. I'm not sure that would really work in Kindle!