July 06, 2012

I may hoard.

I think I'm a book hoarder. No seriously, I really might be. I really like books. I like having them on my shelves, I like reading them, I like how they take up space. Well, sometimes they take up too much space because we don't have enough bookshelves and live in a cave, but still.

I've had all this spare time to fill lately at work and I keep thinking that reading an eBook would be such a phenomenal idea. The only problem is that there's something so much less enjoyable about reading a book on the computer screen than in your hands. I have a really hard time getting into a book that's on the computer. Sure, I've had a pretty abysmal success rate with eBooks lately but I think that has a lot to do with atmosphere.

It's funny, I can read blogs and get totally drawn in, but throw an eBook on the screen and I'm just not feeling it. Even if it's a book I know I want to read I have to save it for the physical copy that I can read all curled up on a couch. I think there's just something about having physical control over the book. That doesn't sound insane at all... Either way, I just like books. Real, paper books.

I've spent a fair amount of time trying to decide if getting an eReader might be something I want (I could get a really cute case for it!) but I don't think so. There's something so nice and convenient about having a book in hand whenever you want to pick it up. A book isn't going to run out of battery on you, you don't need to plug it into anything, and, I may be wrong, but they're really easy to get used and cheap. Sure eBooks tend to be cheaper than their physical copies but that's assuming you like to buy new books all the time. My brother in law bought The Hunger Games for his tablet and spent almost as much as I did on the physical copies. The physical copies look nice on my bookshelf and say "I'm down with pop culture, yes I am!" whereas yeah an eReader might say the same, but it doesn't say "I'm into cheesy fantasy novels, popular books written for teenagers, chick lit, and, apparently, dead political theorists." It just says "I'm technology and you'd never know I'm reading a naughty book under here." Like Fifty Shades of Grey. My mom read the back of it to me and it was racy enough that it's not something I'd want to read at work, that's for sure. Actually, I'm not sure I want to read it anyway. I have a lot of cheesy fantasy books to get though before I'm that desperate.

Granted, there are times I've wanted to hide what I was reading (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) because I want people to take me seriously yadda yadda yadda, but in the end it doesn't really matter. I have no shame. Granted, reading The Lord of the Rings on an eReader might be easier on the hands but I don't think it's really for me. If I was, say, traveling across Europe this summer and didn't feel like hauling around books then maybe then, but for now, and the foreseeable future, I'm down with the classic book in hand, even if it is from the library, smells weird, and has suspicious dark stains on it. I already have a smart phone, I don't need a smart book.

And just on a side note to what I said earlier about The Hunger Games looking good on my bookshelf, that actually isn't true. I've run out of shelf space again and they're currently sitting on our coffee table. It's because I'm a book hoarder, you see. Before we got our two bookshelves, though, it was terrible. I used the bottom of our TV stand to cram most of my books in (the ones I want to keep that don't really need to be displayed, like A Walk to Remember) and the rest were pretty much squashed in next to our DVDs or sitting in piles on the living room floor. Now that I think of it I'm not sure how we lived for almost a year like that. When we did finally buy our second bookshelf I realized that I was missing some books I had definitely wanted to keep when we moved. I found another full box of books that needed homes. See? I really am a book hoarder.

Speaking of hoarding, I went through my knitting basket last night and kept finding tons of yarn I didn't know I had in colours I have no recollection of buying. Thankfully my yarn still fits into my basket and if I ever bothered to organize it wouldn't take up much space at all. Instead it takes up a whole couch with a half finished sweater, random needles, and assorted yarn odds and ends. It's a good thing our living room is so small because we rarely have people over to witness the chaos. Or maybe if we did have people over it wouldn't be chaos. Either way, in my quest for total household organization (picture me saying that like  "total world domination") it's going to get tackled. Hard.

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem and I'll admit I have a passion, but it's not a problem. It's only a problem when Karl no longer fits in our bed because his side is taken over by books. Then it might be a problem.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, if you ever find you have yarn scraps that aren't enough to make a whole project out of, but is too much to throw away, I wouldn't mind taking them off your hands for you. I think I am finally going to start my animal mobile.

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  2. With my yarn hoarding tendencies and passion for striped toque making that might be kind of hard but you should take a look in my basket next time you're over and see what there is anyway. Who knows what treasures you might find?

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