I love books.
I realised this today while I was looking at this, my ‘To Read’ pile.
I’m talking about the love of books here. Not stories, or novels. Books. You know, those things on that shelf there (except There Will Be Blood, that’s a DVD), that you pick up and open and there are words written inside?
I can’t be doing with reading stories on an e-reader like the Kindle, or on an iPad. I don’t really want this blog post to be a point by point argument on why I prefer actual stories in physical or digital form, because the entire argument can be boiled down to one simple sentence.
I fucking love books.
Oh, I’ve already said that? Here’s why:
Books are sold in bookstores. Now, I’m not saying I don’t buy books online, I often do – partly because they can be quite a bit cheaper. But I also buy books in their natural habitat, the bookstores. Even when I don’t buy a book from a bookstore, I absolutely love spending time in them. From Waterstones, Smiths and Borders, to odd, pokey little independent bookcaves. I love them, I can spend ages in them browsing about, picking up random books, flicking through them, feeling them in my hand, checking the first line, chatting with other people and the staff about books, buying a book and sitting in the accompanying coffee shop and starting to read it.
I really don’t like the idea reading words from a cold, shining screen, holding a hunk of metal and plastic between my hands. Okay, some of the designs of e-reading devices are quite cool and aesthetically pleasing, but they are all (even the iPad) ugly pieces of shit compared with any book you care to mention. Books are beautiful things, often fronted with incredible covers that are works of art in themselves. The paper on which the words of the story are printed feel tactile between your fingers as you turn each page, like a connection between the reader and the story, between the reader and the writer. This is a rubbish analogy, but it’s like that hair/tail syncing thing tha Na’vi do in Avatar. A bit. You know what I mean.
Plus, books are meant not only to be read but to be collected.
This isn’t all the books I have, but it’s some of them. They have become a literal part of my room, a part of me. All these different books on these shelves represent part of who I am, or who I was when I bought them. There’s softback and hardback, fiction and non-fiction, reference books, graphic novels and comics, sci-fi and fantasy, horror, some classics, some books I haven’t even read yet! And a whole load of other stuff that makes up these shelves: notebooks, my Rubik’s Cube, various figurines (including Starscream, Will Shakespeare and the Buddy Christ), and random things like the t-shirt tube from UT in Tokyo filled with Yen. These things mean the world to me, as do the books.
The photos in this post are of me, essentially.
