January 1st and time for an annual ritual: the Stacking of the Books.
It’s also the time when many of us make New Year’s resolutions that, let’s face it, we know we’re going to break.
In addition to the old standards about losing weight, getting fit and getting my house in order, I make a yearly pledge to not buy any more books until I’ve read all the ones I already own.
My year begins with the annual ritual I call the Stacking of the Books. It’s a stocktake of sorts. I pile up all the books that came from my enormous unread collection that I’ve managed to read during the past year. Then I stack the books I’ve both purchased or been gifted and read during the past year. Finally I stack the books I bought or was gifted in the past year and didn’t read. Inevitably it’s the tallest of the three piles by a considerable margin. The 2015 stack collapsed twice during its construction. The last step in the ritual is to tally up the net gain of unread books, what I call the UBI or the Unread Book Index. The deficit just seems to grow and grow each year and 2015’s UBI is the worst ever recorded.
In all 44 more books made their way to my shelves during 2015. Just five of them have been read. Despite reading my way through 17 books in 2015, my collection of unread books is now 27 higher than the same time last year.
At this rate I will need to live to about 120 to have any chance of ever reading all the books I own. So why do I do it? Shopping for books is one of the great joys of my life.
There are few greater pleasures than browsing in a book shop. I just love picking up new volumes and flicking through their crisp clean pages, examining dust jackets and cover blurbs. I love weighing up the many options and finally making a selection. I can book browse for hours. I make grown up ‘play dates’ with friends to go book fossicking. It’s one of my favourite forms of entertainment and I always feel obliged to buy something to thank the store owner for providing it.
Book shopping also provides a form of therapy. When I’m sad I cheer myself up by buying books. When I’m happy I celebrate it by buying books. When I reward myself for a hard effort, you guessed it, I reward myself with books.
The only better part is sitting in a comfy chair with a mug of tea or glass of wine and escaping into the pages of the new purchase. Or at least it would be if I didn’t make so many new purchases that it takes me several years to get around to reading them.
My lifelong love of book shopping started when my grandfather gave me money to choose an Enid Blyton for summer reading when I was around 8. I took home The Faraway Tree. I devoured it and wanted more. Then it was on to the Secret Seven and Famous Five. My sister took me shopping to buy my first Famous Five when I was in Grade 5. It would be the first I actually owned rather than borrowed from the library; a very momentous occasion that I recall more than 30 years later. We went to the book section of Myer (when it still a decent book section) and I paced up and down in front of the display of Blytons for what seemed like ages, picking up each and examining the cover and reading the summary of the adventure inside. I finally settled on Five on Kirrin Island Again. The red cover and promise of a light house swayed my decision. I also determined that I would eventually own all 21 of the Five’s adventures. I did get them and still have them. I was hooked and have remained so all my life.
I know, barely half way through the first day of the year, that I will certainly break my resolution to not buy any more books. I’ll probably break it inside the first week of the year. A more realistic resolution might be to try to keep the UBI to single figures in 2016.
Following the Stacking of the Books comes the second ritual of the year: choosing the year’s first book to read. I’ve got plenty to choose from.
2015 books in review
The biggest reading event of the year was the ‘lost’ second novel of Harper Lee. I bookended my year with Harper Lee, reading To Kill A Mockingbird as my last book of 2014 and Go Set a Watchman rounded out 2015. Go Set Watchman is to To Kill a Mockingbird what Return of the Jedi was to Star Wars; it shouldn’t have happened. I can see why Lee’s second book sat unpublished in a drawer for 50 years. It’s 278 pages of plotless boredom. It should have stayed in the drawer.
The middle of year was given over to four books from my rapidly growing collection of books on The Beatles; one of the best rags to riches stories of the 20th Century that never fails to fascinate me. My favourite book of the year was Mark Lewisohn’s epic first instalment of Tune In – the first instalment in his planned trilogy telling the history of the most awesome band ever. In more than 800 pages Lewisohn takes us only to the end of 1962! The second instalment of the trilogy is due in 2016 and it will probably be the cause of that broken resolution.