![aliciakennedy:
Inveterate and Unrepentant Book Collecting: A Guide to My Favorite Contact Sport | Quarterly Conversation
Brutal nerd confession: I keep my library meticulously documented on a spreadsheet so I can keep track of what I have (I own 1,451 books as of 11 June 2010, and have read 946 of them).
Oof. Yeah. See, I love books as objects, but I’m definitely not a collector. If I made our apartment look like this, I’d feel like a sick person. My mother already acts like I’m sick, telling my aunt that I’d have “piles of books all over” my bedroom “like a crazy person.” My only aspiration regarding my book collection is to build a solid library of Latin American and Latin@ fiction. Is that “brutally nerdy”?
I don’t aspire to own that many books but I don’t think I would mind. I’ve read at least 500 times more books than I own. I only keep the ones I really love; I usually pass others on to friends or donate them to libraries (the local library severely lacks variety [unless you count James Patterson AND Danielle Steel as variety]). I think, though, that if at the end of my life I was known as the “crazy dude with all the books” I would be happier than if I was referred to as the “crazy dude with all the cats.”](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5v1e4gnop1qzikdeo1_500.jpg)
Brutal nerd confession: I keep my library meticulously documented on a spreadsheet so I can keep track of what I have (I own 1,451 books as of 11 June 2010, and have read 946 of them).Oof. Yeah. See, I love books as objects, but I’m definitely not a collector. If I made our apartment look like this, I’d feel like a sick person. My mother already acts like I’m sick, telling my aunt that I’d have “piles of books all over” my bedroom “like a crazy person.” My only aspiration regarding my book collection is to build a solid library of Latin American and Latin@ fiction. Is that “brutally nerdy”?
I don’t aspire to own that many books but I don’t think I would mind. I’ve read at least 500 times more books than I own. I only keep the ones I really love; I usually pass others on to friends or donate them to libraries (the local library severely lacks variety [unless you count James Patterson AND Danielle Steel as variety]). I think, though, that if at the end of my life I was known as the “crazy dude with all the books” I would be happier than if I was referred to as the “crazy dude with all the cats.”
