Coming Full Circle / Joyce Bingham

 

 Photo by Joyce Bingham: One peak of my to be read mountain range.

 

 

We had very few books at home when I was growing up, but were a library family, and went every week, and emerged loaded down with books. I went so often and read so much that the librarian arranged an early introduction to the world of grown-up books. I could take out four at a time with my new card. It also gave me access to Agatha Christie and ghost story books, well before I should have been reading them. Perhaps that says a lot about my writing today?

When we went on holiday in the UK, we would take our library cards and exchange them for temporary ‘local’ cards and borrow books, returning them and the cards at the end of our fortnight. Saved a lot of space in your suitcase for wool sweaters and raincoats.

When I had money of my own I bought paperbacks with the odd second-hand hardback. It was exciting to own my books and to re-read on a whim, or look up a passage I remembered. Soon I had an enormous quantity of books, and they required care, bookcases for storage, and a quantity of cardboard boxes for the transfer from home to home. When a book found itself in my care, it never left. Thank goodness they never needed food or vet bills. My library card was dusty and somewhere at the back of a wardrobe in an abandoned handbag.

When e-books arrived, I shunned them. How could I relinquish that book smell? Until one holiday. I’d taken a few paperbacks, planning to exchange them in the hotel library and leave them at the end to make way in the suitcase for liqueurs that tasted delicious on sun-drenched beaches and like synthetic sweetener on a chill summer day in the garden at home. On this holiday there was one paperback in the hotel library. It was an enormous tome of a family drama, ragged and split in two along its spine, connected only by web-like threads. I read it, as did everyone else at the hotel, except for the smug ones with their kindles.

So, I got a kindle, and used it for holidays. I continued to buy paperbacks and second-hand books. My to be read pile was a mountain range. Then I had to make another home move. This time, there didn’t seem to be enough cardboard boxes in the universe for my books. I had to be ruthless. Although I re-homed a few, I still had a sizable quantity to the despair of my removal men.

In 2022 I realised my books had multiplied again, and I had the same issue. A program about a hoarder made me imagine my home with towers of unread books teetering along the hallway and around my bed. It was time for action.

Entering the library after about twenty years, I emerged into the light with a new library card, and the ability to reserve online and borrow e-books. That’s how I read now. I have re-awakened the joy of coming home with a library book. To find the odd things used for bookmarks, to feel the special nap created by the previous readers as they turned the pages. To smell the library deep within the spine. The pitted plastic cover of books read and enjoyed many times, as well as the unexpected discovery of a brand-new book you are the first to open.

I have come full circle. My library card is in constant use, and although the number of books on my shelves is still rising, it’s not with the same intensity. Time to share my books with others and not let my books own me.