Why I can't throw out any of my books

There’s a famous old saying that goes “A house without books is like a room without windows” which is very beautiful and profound – but it’s not true. I have a house with lots of books, and I also have a room without windows because there are huge stacks of books everywhere, blocking them out. My living room is ridiculously book-stuffed: there’s no space on the bookshelves, no room on the floor, no place to even sit down – I have to sit on a stack of chunky film biographies, and use a copy of Minced Meat: The Australian Way as a cushion.

Time for a cull, so I go to the bookshelf, climb a stepladder made of Lemony Snicket stories, and start on the top shelf. This is where the classic literary fiction is and I don’t need any of these: they’re all just sad novels about lovers who die, then the parents die, then the whole village dies, and the narrator turns out to be Death. But …but…these are important cultural touchstones in the history of world literature. And also, they make my friends think I’m the intellectual wanker I desperately need them to think I am. So they have to stay. Move to the next shelf down….

Lots of big glossy art books here: beautiful books about painting, hefty books on design, and a very expensive photography book with a print run of two. But no one ever looks at them, they’re too big to read – you have to open them on the floor and turn the pages with your shoe. Still, I’ll leave them: they’re too valuable, too beautiful, and too heavy – I’d have to hire one of those special cranes that lift wheelchairs into swimming pools.

The middle shelf has the cookbooks: why am I keeping these? I never cook anything more complicated than spag-bol – and if I ever have a fancy dinner party, it’s spag-bol with penne. And yet, they have sentimental value; they map out my entire cooking life. A Thai cuisine cookbook from when I tried to impress my first girlfriend. Rick Stein’s Seafood from when I tried to impress my second girlfriend. And Microwave Cooking For One from when I failed to impress either of those girlfriends.

Bottom shelf is the book-dregs – and I can’t even get rid of these. Not the 1001 All-Time Funniest Golfing Quips that my kids gave me for Father’s Day even though I don’t play golf and I don’t tell quips. Not Dr Seuss’s Hop on Pop that I borrowed off Glenn Ludlow in Grade 2 and I need to return one day, after I’ve finally read it. Not the trashy paperback with a picture of a half-naked girl on the cover and a blurb on the back that said “From a Detroit whorehouse to the boulevards of Paris, all Camille ever wanted in life was sex!” I have no idea how it got on the bookshelf, no memory of buying it – trashy paperbacks with half-naked girls on the cover just seem to come with every house I’ve ever moved into.

Ahhh, it’s too hard: the books can all stay. I’ll just leave the living room as it is, looking like an overstuffed overstocked secondhand bookshop: all that’s missing is a gouty old bookseller-guy huddled in a corner – though for all I know, he’s there, hiding behind that stack of street directories going back to 1966.