Spine Selection

I am informed by those in the know that it is "World Book Day" and that today's blip should involve books, so here is a selection of spines from my "reading now or about to start" pile.

I have a love-hate relationship with books. I learnt to read the year before I started school, yet never progressed beyond the bottom reading level at primary school because I didn't read the school's books. I cannot resist buying books, yet I fall over piles of them in the house. I am fascinated by almost any book, yet I feel hopelessly inadequate when I hear others talking about them as I realise there are so many gaps in my reading and I don't feel like I have the right to declare myself a "book person" at all. I am constantly starting new books (I have had as many as 30 on the go at once) but am also perpetually on a quest to finish ones I'm already reading. Reading a book can leave me almost breathless with passionate excitement, but just seeing the same book under different circumstances can make me dissolve into tears of hopeless despair.

Once I start a book, it is almost certain that I will finish it, whether it takes just a few hours or many years. I have only ever completely abandoned a book once - a terrible science fiction thing I got for 20p in a jumble sale.

At the moment I feel dreadfully behind with my reading. When I am ill, as I have been recently, I am unable to read at all - the concentration required is simply too great and my mind cannot focus on even the simplest of books. I'm just beginning to get back to it now, but feel as though I have a lot of catching up to do.

There are perhaps two things for which I value books the most. One is that they contain information, which is, in my mind, the most valuable currency of all. The other is that they can transport me to a world that I can never actually reach in physical reality: I have climbed Everest 5 times from the safety of my bathtub, and I have resided in magnificent palaces and attended the most sumptuous magnificent nineteenth-century ball while curled up on a shabby sofa wearing comfy casual clothes and surrounded by all the conveniences of modern life!

Wonder what this pile of books has to teach me and into what hitherto unknown worlds it will take me?