A Lifetime of Reading: The Joys and Challenges of a Book Lover
In the early 2000s, a couple's search for an apartment with 'lots of walls' for their extensive book collection highlights the deep connection between books and identity. From humble beginnings to a vast library, this article explores the journey of a devoted reader.
BooksReadingLibraryPersonal GrowthKnowledgeReal EstateSep 13, 2025
Real Estate:In the early 2000s, my partner and I were on the hunt for an apartment. Our unique requirement for 'lots of walls' often left real estate brokers puzzled. We repeatedly clarified that we needed solid brick walls to support the sturdy bookshelves required for our 4,000-plus volume collection.
I did not come from a family of readers. Growing up in India, my reading options were limited to school texts. That changed when we emigrated to Australia, where I found myself the only non-white student among 750 high school students. Making connections was challenging, as most students already knew each other from primary school and few lived nearby. I turned to reading as a solace. The school had a library, and an even better-stocked public one was within walking distance. This marked the beginning of a lifetime of reading, though I was unaware of Petrarch’s warning: “Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest.”
I began working part-time before the legally permissible age of fifteen to earn money, which gave me the independence to buy books rather than borrow them. This became a habit, and over time, I slowly built my collection. Some of the volumes on my shelves date back to the early 1970s.
Books are often linked to identity and ego. For some, a library is more for display than reading. There are hardbacks and leather-bound editions, which a bookbinder once told me are investments for the wealthy and rarely opened, let alone read. There are also fancy bookshelves and bookends that can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, made from materials like stone, marble, optical glass, and cast iron. My books, however, are cheap paperbacks, many second-hand or discarded library copies. My bookshelves are utilitarian, and my bookends are standard library fare. My interest lies solely in the content.
Reading and books remain integral to my life. It has never been about entertainment but about knowledge. As an emigrant who has left a life behind, I know that the only thing you truly have is what you know and can carry in your mind. Everything else is transient.
Books are time stamps, reflecting when and why you read them. They are tied to personal and historical events, shaping your relationships with others. The weightiest decision my partner and I had to make was whether to merge our separate book collections. To this day, each title is stamped to identify its original owner. As Argentine writer Carlos María Domínguez observed, “To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.”
It is possible to deconstruct books. What to read? Should you purchase physical volumes or digital editions? How does the knowledge affect your relationships with others? Do you lend your books?
Assuming you read two books a week from the age of ten, you would get through around 7,000 books in a lifetime. Given there may be 160 million unique works, selectivity is essential. At the beginning, I had little idea of what to read or what was worth reading. Not moving amongst readers, I lacked literary markers. Book reviews were something I knew nothing about. I read without discrimination, feeding my curiosity, which might be the greatest asset for a reader. One book led to another as I followed an author, subject, or a work referred to in the book I was reading.
Some teachers provided guidance, encouraging reading beyond the curriculum. This led me to translated Russian and European works, and now my reading extends to works from around the world. I overheard someone say that art critic Robert Hughes, then enjoying popularity with his Shock of the New, was repeating what Clement Greenberg had written. I read Greenberg’s essays. Spending days in bookshops widened my interests. I have spent days rummaging through shelves and sometimes reading entire books, occasionally drawing attention from staff concerned that I was homeless, a shoplifter, or worse.
My tastes remain eclectic, spanning fiction, history, philosophy, current affairs, politics, science, travel, biography, culture, art, and nature writing. Some suspect I would read the telephone directory if there was nothing else handy.
Lacking access to the theatre, I read scripts. Even though I can now watch live performances, my preference remains the written work. It avoids the disappointment of modern auteur directors’ novel stagings, gender bending, tedious multi-media trickery, and lack of adherence to the text. ‘Adapted from [insert name of drama]’ now passes for theatre.
While seeing a painting or sculpture is preferable, art books are sometimes the only option. Standing in line and rushing past a painting, propelled by a surging crowd, means you rarely get to linger and study the work. New ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions do not always live up to their billing, consisting of a few notable works and other lesser items, sketches, or ‘works of followers.’ Major retrospectives are frequently thousands of miles away. Art books with decent quality reproductions frequently allow closer study and a more comprehensive perspective on an artist.
Genre, I have come to understand, is irrelevant. You can learn more about Russia from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Solzhenitsyn than from standard histories. Ryszard Kapuściński’s travel books tell you more about world politics than learned analytical works.
It is important to be true to Socrates’s dictate: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I have tried to know everything about something and something about everything.
Perhaps because of my age, I continue to prefer bound volumes and have never embraced eBooks. The tactile quality of real books remains magical.
Our books are organized by subject matter or genre, then alphabetically within each category. This creates unexpected juxtapositions: Dostoevsky and Conan Doyle; Baldwin and Bellow sandwiched between Babel and Borges; Kafka and Kawabata; Musil following Murakami; Zweig’s The World of Yesterday ends fiction. In biographies, King precedes Kissinger, while Mao and Mapplethorpe find themselves next to each other. Locational accidents allow new discoveries.
The books record the effluxion of time as the fragility of some titles shows. As the collection outstrips the capacity of the shelves, disorder creeps in. Individual items sit horizontally over the vertical rows. Double rows appear, creating problems of invisibility and access. It mirrors the growing confusion and chaos of the world.
For me, reading is a solitary pursuit. Machiavelli donned fine court robes, discarding his working clothes before secluding himself to read. Although I keep meticulous notes on points of interest, I have never found it necessary to discuss texts with others.
Book clubs or their equivalents are about people’s need for social connections rather than the works. Some communal approaches embrace travel and adventure, such as reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick onboard a ship in a Scottish gale, Homer’s Odyssey on a Greek island, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in St Ives, and Marcel Proust in Paris. The field trips are meant to contextualize books by studying them in their original setting. In company, the works are peripheral to self-exploration by people who want to be writers.
Semiotician Roland Barthes proposed a theory of reading. In his essays Pleasure of the Text and S/Z, he distinguishes between 'readerly' and 'writerly' texts (sometimes translated as 'readable' and 'writable'). The first does not challenge the reader, who receives information passively. The second confronts the reader, forcing them to engage actively, even re-enact the arguments of the writer. My preference has always been to argue metaphorically with the writer, allowing the text to remain alive and be reinvented constantly.
There is the vexed issue of whether you lend your titles. I rarely do, as it is unclear whether others will treat the items with the care expected. Erasmus and Petrarch fetishized books like holy relics, believing their library to be paradise.
Recently, we contemplated downsizing in recognition of the approaching end of our lives. It would mean disposing of the bulk of our books, following William Morris’s command: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” It forced me to consider a life without books. I could still read, of course, but that has become intimately connected with my collection. I enjoy walking down the shelves to find something I am thinking of and reread it. Placing a new title in its place gives pleasure. There is the visual appeal of row upon row of titles.
Increasingly, I think about the meaning of reading and books. Walter Benjamin wrote about unpacking his library. The German only came alive through his books, not the other way around. His books were building stones defining a room into which he could disappear. I have come to agree with American journalist Christopher Morley: “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.”
I did not come from a family of readers. Growing up in India, my reading options were limited to school texts. That changed when we emigrated to Australia, where I found myself the only non-white student among 750 high school students. Making connections was challenging, as most students already knew each other from primary school and few lived nearby. I turned to reading as a solace. The school had a library, and an even better-stocked public one was within walking distance. This marked the beginning of a lifetime of reading, though I was unaware of Petrarch’s warning: “Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest.”
I began working part-time before the legally permissible age of fifteen to earn money, which gave me the independence to buy books rather than borrow them. This became a habit, and over time, I slowly built my collection. Some of the volumes on my shelves date back to the early 1970s.
Books are often linked to identity and ego. For some, a library is more for display than reading. There are hardbacks and leather-bound editions, which a bookbinder once told me are investments for the wealthy and rarely opened, let alone read. There are also fancy bookshelves and bookends that can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, made from materials like stone, marble, optical glass, and cast iron. My books, however, are cheap paperbacks, many second-hand or discarded library copies. My bookshelves are utilitarian, and my bookends are standard library fare. My interest lies solely in the content.
Reading and books remain integral to my life. It has never been about entertainment but about knowledge. As an emigrant who has left a life behind, I know that the only thing you truly have is what you know and can carry in your mind. Everything else is transient.
Books are time stamps, reflecting when and why you read them. They are tied to personal and historical events, shaping your relationships with others. The weightiest decision my partner and I had to make was whether to merge our separate book collections. To this day, each title is stamped to identify its original owner. As Argentine writer Carlos María Domínguez observed, “To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.”
It is possible to deconstruct books. What to read? Should you purchase physical volumes or digital editions? How does the knowledge affect your relationships with others? Do you lend your books?
Assuming you read two books a week from the age of ten, you would get through around 7,000 books in a lifetime. Given there may be 160 million unique works, selectivity is essential. At the beginning, I had little idea of what to read or what was worth reading. Not moving amongst readers, I lacked literary markers. Book reviews were something I knew nothing about. I read without discrimination, feeding my curiosity, which might be the greatest asset for a reader. One book led to another as I followed an author, subject, or a work referred to in the book I was reading.
Some teachers provided guidance, encouraging reading beyond the curriculum. This led me to translated Russian and European works, and now my reading extends to works from around the world. I overheard someone say that art critic Robert Hughes, then enjoying popularity with his Shock of the New, was repeating what Clement Greenberg had written. I read Greenberg’s essays. Spending days in bookshops widened my interests. I have spent days rummaging through shelves and sometimes reading entire books, occasionally drawing attention from staff concerned that I was homeless, a shoplifter, or worse.
My tastes remain eclectic, spanning fiction, history, philosophy, current affairs, politics, science, travel, biography, culture, art, and nature writing. Some suspect I would read the telephone directory if there was nothing else handy.
Lacking access to the theatre, I read scripts. Even though I can now watch live performances, my preference remains the written work. It avoids the disappointment of modern auteur directors’ novel stagings, gender bending, tedious multi-media trickery, and lack of adherence to the text. ‘Adapted from [insert name of drama]’ now passes for theatre.
While seeing a painting or sculpture is preferable, art books are sometimes the only option. Standing in line and rushing past a painting, propelled by a surging crowd, means you rarely get to linger and study the work. New ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions do not always live up to their billing, consisting of a few notable works and other lesser items, sketches, or ‘works of followers.’ Major retrospectives are frequently thousands of miles away. Art books with decent quality reproductions frequently allow closer study and a more comprehensive perspective on an artist.
Genre, I have come to understand, is irrelevant. You can learn more about Russia from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Solzhenitsyn than from standard histories. Ryszard Kapuściński’s travel books tell you more about world politics than learned analytical works.
It is important to be true to Socrates’s dictate: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I have tried to know everything about something and something about everything.
Perhaps because of my age, I continue to prefer bound volumes and have never embraced eBooks. The tactile quality of real books remains magical.
Our books are organized by subject matter or genre, then alphabetically within each category. This creates unexpected juxtapositions: Dostoevsky and Conan Doyle; Baldwin and Bellow sandwiched between Babel and Borges; Kafka and Kawabata; Musil following Murakami; Zweig’s The World of Yesterday ends fiction. In biographies, King precedes Kissinger, while Mao and Mapplethorpe find themselves next to each other. Locational accidents allow new discoveries.
The books record the effluxion of time as the fragility of some titles shows. As the collection outstrips the capacity of the shelves, disorder creeps in. Individual items sit horizontally over the vertical rows. Double rows appear, creating problems of invisibility and access. It mirrors the growing confusion and chaos of the world.
For me, reading is a solitary pursuit. Machiavelli donned fine court robes, discarding his working clothes before secluding himself to read. Although I keep meticulous notes on points of interest, I have never found it necessary to discuss texts with others.
Book clubs or their equivalents are about people’s need for social connections rather than the works. Some communal approaches embrace travel and adventure, such as reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick onboard a ship in a Scottish gale, Homer’s Odyssey on a Greek island, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in St Ives, and Marcel Proust in Paris. The field trips are meant to contextualize books by studying them in their original setting. In company, the works are peripheral to self-exploration by people who want to be writers.
Semiotician Roland Barthes proposed a theory of reading. In his essays Pleasure of the Text and S/Z, he distinguishes between 'readerly' and 'writerly' texts (sometimes translated as 'readable' and 'writable'). The first does not challenge the reader, who receives information passively. The second confronts the reader, forcing them to engage actively, even re-enact the arguments of the writer. My preference has always been to argue metaphorically with the writer, allowing the text to remain alive and be reinvented constantly.
There is the vexed issue of whether you lend your titles. I rarely do, as it is unclear whether others will treat the items with the care expected. Erasmus and Petrarch fetishized books like holy relics, believing their library to be paradise.
Recently, we contemplated downsizing in recognition of the approaching end of our lives. It would mean disposing of the bulk of our books, following William Morris’s command: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” It forced me to consider a life without books. I could still read, of course, but that has become intimately connected with my collection. I enjoy walking down the shelves to find something I am thinking of and reread it. Placing a new title in its place gives pleasure. There is the visual appeal of row upon row of titles.
Increasingly, I think about the meaning of reading and books. Walter Benjamin wrote about unpacking his library. The German only came alive through his books, not the other way around. His books were building stones defining a room into which he could disappear. I have come to agree with American journalist Christopher Morley: “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the significance of having 'lots of walls' for a book collection?
Having 'lots of walls' is important for supporting sturdy bookshelves required for a large book collection, ensuring the books are properly stored and displayed.
How does reading contribute to personal growth?
Reading contributes to personal growth by expanding knowledge, enhancing critical thinking, and providing new perspectives on various subjects and life experiences.
What are the benefits of physical books over digital editions?
Physical books offer a tactile and visual appeal that many readers find enjoyable. They also provide a tangible connection to the content and can be more engaging than digital editions.
How can a book collection reflect one's identity?
A book collection can reflect one's identity by showcasing the reader's interests, values, and intellectual pursuits, often becoming a personal and historical record of their life.
What are some challenges of maintaining a large book collection?
Maintaining a large book collection can be challenging due to space constraints, the need for organization, and the potential for disorder and chaos as the collection grows.
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