“I cannot live without books” (Thomas Jefferson to John Adams)

I love books. I also love to read, but the two are not necessarily the same thing. Reading is for pleasure, to educate and inform myself, to “listen” to other people’s perspectives and to give me something to think about after I’ve finished. I read both fiction and non; for fiction it’s mostly sci-fi and fantasy, the occasional mystery thrown in and of course the classics of fiction as well. In non-fiction it’s everything from history, philosophy, religion and politics to the hard sciences like neurology, nutrition and biochemistry. I’ve been known to read textbooks if I’m interested enough in the topic, but that’s admittedly somewhat rare.

I have an iPad that has the iBooks app, as well as Kindle and Nook, and they are great for when I travel (which is a lot, these days). I think it’s fantastic that I can carry a dozen books in my iPad with no additional effort. So when I got the iPad I thought that maybe my book-buying days were over.

But I was wrong.

As I said, I love books. I love the way they feel. I love to hold them as I read. If it’s a leather-bound book, I love the smell of the leather and the feel of the book in my hands. There’s something about the weight of the book and its texture that appeals to me. When I heard that the Encyclopedia Britannica was not going to be putting out a print edition any more (the Web is a much more appropriate system for a reference work than print), that I bought one of the last sets of the last edition. It’s currently still in boxes in a closet, waiting for me build new bookshelves.

I follow a forum called Quora. One of the questions posted recently was whether or not it’s possible to own too many books. This caught my interest, since Cathy believes that I am living proof of the affirmative. In any case, one of the responses got me thinking that maybe I should be doing more with my books than I have been. Below is the response:

“This was my father’s library.

Throughout my life, we’d all sit down to dinner as a family and talk and books would be pulled down from these shelves and brought to the table to prove, disprove or expand whatever we were talking about.

We all did our homework in this room and used the books as reference material.

Often, when friends came over, my father gave them a book related to the conversation we had held as a parting gift.

…Books should be loved and read and held and underlined and earmarked and referred to and given away.   Used correctly, you can never have too many books.”

I really like those sentiments. They were written by Dushka Zapata who writes a very interesting blog; (she’s an advertising exec from San Francisco). Anyhow, the more I think about it, the more I agree:  books should be referred to and shared.

The giving away part I have to think more about. That would be hard.