Sure, books furnish a room. And then they completely take it over, if you’re not careful.
In my teens I witnessed my parents’ rabid de-booking of their home, shipping out carton after carton of falling-to-bits paperbacks to any charity shop that would have them. I saved Scoop! and Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I - both almost unreadable for disintegration. The Plague and I is now missing the first 11 pages. Around the same age I also witnessed the despair of a neighbour who was trying to dismantle the vast library of her deceased husband. I think he was both a lawyer and a medic, in a pre-internet age, and therefore vast, leather-bound, very dull books abounded.
So I approached my adult life thinking “You won’t get me, books!” I, personally, own almost none. One copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Secret History, and all except the first 11 pages of The Plague and I. I don’t know what happened to Scoop!
But my family! Jesus CHRIST.
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