The buying of books

I love books. I love the feel of them. I love them to be around me and parting with them is like loosing a friend - unless of course it was a book I disliked, but even then they can have their value and you can be revisited and discovered to be more friendly in later years.

Many of the books on my shelves have been inherited from my parents and other relatives. These are books which I have always promised myself I will read "one day". I've also bought a lot over the years which have not been read for one reason or another. Well about a year ago I realised that if I didn't start soon, that  "one day" might never come, so at the end of December I decided I would only read books that were in the house already and had been there for some considerable time. And I've stuck to it and loved every minute of it.

I have read such a variety - books that fascinated me as a child on my parents' shelves, books brought into our home by our grown up children and left behind, books given as gifts and long ago shelved for a moment such as this. I've discovered amazing authors who are long forgotten but who could write a jolly good story and it's given me a peek into the fiction-world familiar to other generations. It's been wonderful. One of my early reads in this experiment was "The Bond Maid" by Pearl Buck. She is well known for her book "The Good Earth" published in 1931 for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and then in 1938 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But who has heard of her now?  "The Bond Maid" is well written and she deserves greater attention. As a child this book's cover fascinated me - an Chinese woman arranging flowers; it seemed so enchanting. Well it was as enchanting a read as a cover!

I have not loved everything I've picked up, but I've certainly read more widely than ever before.
And I'm going to do it for another year. However, I have decided to change the rules a little. Some friends want to lend me books and in return I will lend them one of mine.
Do you know I think they used to do something like this long ago in the dark ages - people borrowed books and brought them back; I believe it was called a public library!