A severe storage crisis meant that for almost a year my book collection was banished to the floor of the spare room. After a while the books began to whisper to each other in that sniffy way books do when they feel neglected. A well-read Marian Keyes started to tease an as-yet-unread Leo Tolstoy.
A volume of Sylvia Plath whinged about the Jackie Collins bonkbuster resting haphazardly on her spine. As a much-loved Lewis Carroll exploded with laughter, a Roddy Doyle, a John Connolly and a Joseph O'Connor had a terse conversation about each other's success in the book charts. And in the dustiest corner a handful of soccer and snooker tomes bemoaned the lack of like-minded souls on the floor.
It was only when their whispering started to bother the neighbours that we gave in and ordered some built-in shelves. From a distance it all looked deeply impressive. Hundreds of books standing to attention as if waiting for that random moment when they would be plucked for reading once more. Tall and small, fat and thin, sombre and whimsical. I stood in front of them and felt an unexpected sense of achievement at what represented almost 30 years of reading life. Suddenly I was 10 again, making a tent from my bed sheets and aiming a dim torch at the precious pages. Turning them slowly, silently, sleepily, swimming in another time and space.
The shelves meant my reading life was now an open book. From When We Were Very Young through National Velvet to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, they were spread out for the first time in neat rows before me. When I reached out and touched them they felt more than familiar. They felt like friends.
Sadly, after they had been up on the shelves for a few weeks I started to become a bit sniffy about them myself. The first negative emotion I experienced was disappointment that I didn't own half as many books as I thought I did. Before we stacked the books I confidently predicted the shelves couldn't possibly hold them all. I imagined there would still be little leaning towers of literature all over the floor, a testament to my book-loving ways. As it turned out, there was at least one empty shelf, which the proud owner of the soccer annuals quickly filled up with board games, ruining the learned library look I was going for.
The next crisis came when I started to look more closely at the books I had accumulated. Fair enough, the four - four! - Jeffrey Archer novels had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't work out how I ended up with quite so many books on self-improvement. This reality became even more depressing after a quick tally of all the things I should have been able to do had I only read them properly. These included but were not limited to: buying a used car, driving a used car, understanding men, understanding women, speaking Serbo-Croat, speaking Polish, destressing my life, decluttering my life, convincing someone to marry and not leave me, losing weight, gaining self-esteem, being an excellent lover and being an even more excellent housewife. Guidelines on the fabulous person I could have been almost filled a shelf.
Other people's books can tell a lot about a person. With my life in books so beautifully arranged, the question was what they said about me. If the busy self-help section wasn't bad enough, at least three of the most prominent shelves were packed with the kind of colourful paperbacks that litter the bedrooms of teenage girls. Should I throw them out and replace them? And with what? With books I have no intention of reading but would like people to think I had, of course. War and Peace. Ulysses. Those two should do the trick.
As I scanned the shelves I grew less exhilarated and more frustrated. Why did I have so many Agatha Christie thrillers? What possessed me to hand over money for the likes of Brendan O'Carroll's The Mammy? Naturally, there were many books I was proud to own, but I discovered there were far too many that brought out the literary snob in me. A snob that hadn't existed before we got the bookshelves made. A snob I didn't like.
Because, when I thought about it, there was a good reason why Adrian Mole, Brendan O'Carroll, Silas Marner, the Royle family, Ruth Rendell, Agatha Christie, Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, Charlotte Brontë and Morag Prunty were all happily hanging out on the one shelf. A good reason why CS Lewis, Jackie Collins, Roald Dahl, Iain Banks, AA Milne and Noel Streatfield have been at various times among my very best book friends.
The books collected and stored over the years speak volumes about their owners. They are the diary we never got around to filling, the autobiography waiting to be written. We might wish all the books on our shelves had Booker-winning potential, but weeding out the ones that don't make us look good, the ones that make us cringe, is nothing short of book cheating. Because they are us, for better or worse, swimming in another time and space.
