Booked for the Weekend

Children’s author Carolyn Haywood died in 1990, but I’m still holding her responsible for the fact that I can’t manage to redecorate my bedroom in a weekend.

On TV home renovation shows, they can clear the space, slap paint on the walls, hammer a new wall unit together and have everything in place within a day or two.

How did they do it, I wondered, when I need a week just to get the bookshelves emptied? Then it hit me – the homes and rooms I saw featured didn’t have bookshelves to empty. There weren’t any books.

Since the day in 1976 when I picked up Haywood’s "B" Is For Betsy, I’ve known the power that lies within a book. I was five and reading an entire book independently for the first time. Sorting the letters and words into something that made sense was like opening the door to an infinite number of other worlds, filled with adventure, mystery, tragedy and joy. After that first book, I wanted to read anything and everything I could get my hands on, from the cereal packet to my mother’s magazines.

So for almost 30 years now, I’ve bought, borrowed and acquired books. As my own family has grown, so too has the number of books that surround me. My husband and children are also "people who read" – a term an acquaintance once used when she visited our home for the first time. "Have you read all these books?" she asked as she looked around the living room. Amazed to hear that, for the most part, we had, she wondered, "Then why do you keep them?"

Aye… there’s the rub. If we’ve finished a book, why keep it? Why is it that even the stories we didn’t particularly like have still earned a place of permanence on the shelf?

Like most "people who keep things", it’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for our tendency to hang on to books. Even the most tattered tomes – with covers missing, bindings broken and pages perilously close to falling out – are treated to a spot on the shelf. It’s not until so much of the book is gone that it can’t be appreciated by even the most voracious reader that we sadly consign it to the rubbish bin. Invariably, the very next week, we realise how much we wanted to read that title again, so we go out and buy another copy.

We’re reluctant to give books away, too. We just never know when we’re going to want to read them again.