Throw Away Your Books

There are few places I love as much as bookshops. It is often one of the most quiet places around. People walk around - pull out a book, read a few lines, put it back and check another one. Books for thousands and thousands of euro are there at your disposal. You have the right to go around for as long as you want - picking, choosing, discarding, and then, once you have found the perfect book, just the thing you need and desperately want, you can go up to the counter and...

That's where the dream usually stops for me nowadays. I love bookshops, but I hate owning books. Every book you own demands its own place - its own few centimeters in the bookshelf. It wants you to carry it around when you move. The bookshelf wants to take up wall space, which otherwise could have been used to put something that really was intended to be beautiful, like a painting or an old musical instrument or even a nicely shaped branch you found in the garden. The book demands all that, and you soon discover that the master is not you, it is the physical object of a book, which has you in its hands.

What about reading then? Well, I can easily load as many books on my Palm pilot, which fits in my pocket, as my grandfather read in his entire life. Why give in for the demands of books, when you can use computer files, which take no physical space at all?

The problem is the bookshops. I still love them. What I usually do is to buy at least one book at each visit. Then I throw it away in the nearest dustbin. Buying the book, I economically support the existence of bookshops. Getting rid of the book, I rid myself of its demands on me. And by not giving the book to any of my friends, I force them to buy books themselves, which then supports the bookshops.

The sin is not to throw away a book. The sin would be not to have bought it in the first place.