I own 577 books. I know this because I use the excellent Delicious Library to keep track of books I’ve loaned to people and keep tabs on them for insurance purposes (most my books are just trade paperbacks, but I have some rare books as well).
Moving from a two bedroom flat in which every room has a 6 foot tall bookcase into a single room means that less then a quarter of these books can actually accompany me. The result of this is much debate as I go through my collect and decide what I can’t live without.
The bulk of the books I’ve taken with me are related to my degree in some way – politics biographies, political philosophy treatises, textbooks, Greek and Roman classics, commentaries and so on. Some are distantly related, but useful – history books covering Europe, Scotland, Britain and Germany through various key stages for example.
All this has left less then two shelves for my fiction collection.
What I judge to be essential enough to me to fill this space probably says a lot about me. It includes a whole swathe of dystopian fiction – 1984, Brave New World, We, Fahrenheit 451, Gormenghast, Live at Golgotha and Catch-22; the essential Tolkien works; my favourite Iain M Banks’ books – Use of Weapons and Excessions; a few modern classics – How To Kill A Mockingbird, The City and The Pillar. The books I’ve been strictest with are Terry Pratchett and my massive collection of sci-fi books – I haven’t taken a single Pratchett and the only sci-fi novel I’m taking other then Banks is Asimov’s Foundation.
On top of these, there are about 50 books which were occupying my To Be Read stack – previously a monstrous collection consisting of four piles spread around every flat surface in my bedroom.
I have absolutely no idea where I’m going to fit all these books. Not least given that I’ll have to buy more books for Uni in the near future. It’s a hard life being a book-geek.