Why I Love Books

It’s Valentine’s Day so I thought I’d write about my love of…books! When I say I love books, I really do – I have an emotional attachment to them and cannot imagine my life without them. I love everything about them – how they look, how they feel, even how they smell. I love how they look stood together on a bookshelf and one of my proudest ever purchases was my recent shiny white IKEA bookshelf, where finally after years of being anonymously stacked in cupboards and any free spaces, I now have a space to admire my book collection.

 Image: my book (and music) collection proudly displayed on my IKEA shelving unit

One of my dreams is to have a house where there is a massive wall that has built in shelves full of books. It would take a lifetime’s dedication to book buying to fill it but that sounds good to me. I regret selling, giving away and lending (to people who never returned them) many of the books that I have read – my current collection is of course only a fraction of all the books I have ever read. A person’s bookshelf tells you a lot about them – mine has everything from sports and music biographies (lots of cricketers and 90s musicians) to modern classics (1984, American Psycho), football programmes (games I have been to and some from the year I was born) to educational books (from website management for my job to the brilliant Succeed For Yourself by Richard Denny).

I love exploring other people’s bookshelves and whenever I visit my mum I usually find myself picking up a book she inherited from her mum – the Modern Housewife's Encyclopaedia. Published in the early 1950’s, it is a brilliant instruction manual for the ‘modern’ housewife – well the housewife from the 1950’s. There are instructions on how the modern housewife should behave towards her husband and even better there are illustrations to explain the point. My favourite of these is of the husband mowing the lawn and smoking a pipe whilst the wife is in the kitchen wearing a pinafore and getting dinner ready. I think it is beautiful. It is a historical document of how people lived (or at least were expected to live) but more than that it is a physical piece of history. When I pick up the book it is like I am connecting with my nana. I am holding something that she once held. The orange staining of the pages is from the cigarettes that she smoked. It is the closest thing I have to being able to travel back in time and understand how my nana lived her life.

A few years ago I discovered an even more precious book than this. After my nana died, my granddad carried on living in their council house until his death 10 years later. My uncle then took over the tenancy until he then died 8 years after that. Helping my mum to clear out the house I found a very exciting discovery – my nana’s diary from 1983. I don’t know why my nana kept a diary in 1983, and as far as I know she never kept one from any other year, but I am very glad that she did. I burnt my arm in 1983 and thanks to her diary I am now able to know exactly when it happened. More importantly I have an insight into my nana’s life – daily trips to the shops, cooking every day, worrying about her son (my uncle) and the hard work that she did every day to keep her house in order. It sounds like a very boring existence and it probably was. I felt quite sad for my nana when I finished reading it.

My love of books is down to my mum and I will always be grateful to her from that. She read to me and encouraged me to read. Most significantly my mum used to work part-time in a library. Being a single mother my mum was unable to organise or afford to pay for anyone to look after me when she worked during the school holidays so instead I used to hang out in the library all day. The children’s book section of Gainsborough Library in Ipswich was like a home from home to me in the early 90s and I read a lot of books there. I also learnt about categorising books and even the Dewey catalogue system, I used to stamp books for customers and helped put the books away correctly. The most memorable book I read from this time was called Jeremy Blew It. Naturally I picked it for the title but I enjoyed the story – from what I remember it was set in America and was about Jeremy and his friend Yo-less (so called because he never said ‘yo’) as they negotiated their way through the challenges of High School.

Children’s books are magical things as they open up the wonder and beauty of books to children. If I ever have the pleasure of having a child of my own then I will make sure that they have a bookshelf with as many classic children’s books as I can fill it with. From Spot Says Woof to Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and C.S. Lewis I would get great pleasure out of passing on the love of books to the next generation. 

Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five Books and Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia books really connected with me when I was a child. The books were regrettably probably sold at car boot sales for pennies – I wish I had kept them instead as would love to pick them up again today. One of the few children’s books I still have is called the Book of Myths and Legends. It was a favourite of mine in my early teens and has been read so much that the spine and cover has completely fallen off. Picking it up again takes me back to my early teens and reading the book at a time that I should have been asleep. Over the years I wrote little notes in it so it’s great to look at it now and get an insight into my younger self.

Because that is the thing that most connects me to books – their physical presence. That’s why I can’t get into e-books. I have tried – I have Kindle installed on my iPad and have downloaded some of the classic novels that you can get for free. But I just can’t get into it. I want to hold a book, I want to feel the pages as I turn them, and I want to feel a connection with it. I just don’t get that with e-books. I think they’re a great invention but they aren’t for me. That’s because I love books. Not just reading. I love books and I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them.