Books: Part 2

Poem For The Day is a poetry anthology, as you can probably tell from the title. It presents a poem for each day of the year, including February 29th. It’s not really my book, it was one of my mum’s books, I’ve just held on to it for some reason. That’s going to be changing though, because this is one of the ones I will be getting rid of. I’ll probably donate it to the charity shop, along with all the others I decide I don’t want to keep anymore. Now I was very close to throwing this one out last time I went through “pruning” my book collection, but I kept hold of it for a reason that is rather similar to what I was talking about at the end of the last post.

Poetry as an idea is held in very high regard by a lot of people, but I’ve just never been able to really appreciate it. Or at least I don’t feel like I have, there are a few (and I really mean a few, a mere handful) poems that I really appreciate and have enjoyed or found helpful in some way, but even with those I feel like there’s something I’m missing. The very structure of poetry is something that has always seemed overwhelming to me, there are all these complex rules and different things going on at once. Metre and iambs and line breaks, I just don’t know where to start and I’ve always felt very restricted by it. I think I mentioned before me and my friend both wrote things of our own, and I never paid attention to any of those kinds of rules. I couldn’t explain to you what makes the structure of the sonnet form for example, I understand why the more intuitive aspects of poetry appeal to people like rhyme and the use of symbolism or imagery but that’s it really. Conjuring up a pretty picture, or a rather frightening or unpleasant one for that matter, isn’t a technique exclusive to poetry however. Anyone can do it, it takes no real talent. The best work, or at least what seems to be considered so by those who know what they’re talking about, does far more than pair similar sounding words.

I don’t have any interest in writing poetry though, I just want to be able to get the same enjoyment from reading it that so many other people seem to be able to and I can’t. That’s what I’m getting at when I talk about how restrictive it can be, it requires study to enjoy it. No other art requires that. Yes if you have an understanding of the complexities of say music theory for example, you will gain a far deeper appreciation for the music you already love (whether it be a famous piece from the classical period or a pop song you have fond memories of), but you do already love them. You can be a layman and find beauty in any of the other fine arts, and in fact that initial response you have to a particular work might be what inspires you to learn more.

I have another poetry book that I will be keeping however, it’s The Puffin Book of Fantastic First Poems. See my mum, unlike me, did seem to genuinely like and enjoy poetry. Both reading it and writing her own. In fact she had a collection of her own published, and my uncle and I were recently asked for copyright clearance by the national poetry library on some of her work. There are a few copies here at home but they’re with my dad’s books. Thinking back, I imagine she bought this puffin book for me in the hopes of inspiring that same love of poetry she had within me. To be honest, looking back it does seem that at the time she was right. I have very fond memories of this book, I can remember distinctly how much fun I had reciting my favourite ones over and over. That’s the reason I’m going to be keeping it, I know I said last week that I shouldn’t let sentimentality stop me from holding on to things that I don’t really value, but I do really value it. There are definitely other books from my childhood that I remember fondly which I will be getting rid of, because as I said I don’t plan to return to them and I doubt I’ll have children to pass them on to. I do return to this puffin book every few years though, and I think having that portal back to my early childhood can be helpful sometimes. It’s not just the poems contained inside, it’s the delightful watercolour illustrations, it’s my name scribbled on the inside of the cover, the tears and slight damage.

That I was reading these poems aloud, back when I first got this book as a child, is I think what gave me such an appreciation for them. After all poetry is meant to be spoken ultimately, not read. Again there’s this romantic idea people have of certain poems that are special to them and that they’ve memorised being something they can repeat to themselves in times of great peril or distress. Providing them with a sense of hope, or at the very least respite from the darkness surrounding them, like the shining light of Earendil’s star in Frodo’s phial. Or there’s the image of ancient greek hoplites reciting long passages of the Iliad to their comrades on the eve of battle to remind themselves of their noble ancestors. Poetry is this thing we all have great respect for, but it never seems to quite live up to the hype. Or maybe this is just another reason for me to feel like a stupid person, it’s hard to tell. Maybe anything other than poems for little children is too complex for me, or maybe if I’d have grown up in a time before thousands of TV channels and millions of youtube videos I’d have developed differently in this regard.

There are some “real” poems (for adults, or whatever) that I like too, “On A Portrait Of A Deaf Man” is one I’ve returned to quite a few times over the last half decade. In fact for one of my final GCSE exams (those are the tests we take around the age of 15 here) I wrote an analysis of it. If I read what I wrote for that today I’d probably be quite unimpressed with myself, after all I was only a teenager with a much poorer understanding of things than I realised at the time. However I think that maybe the fact that I had to spend a lot of time really thinking about every line might be why I was able to develop an appreciation for this poem when I so rarely can.

The poem itself is an elegy for the poet’s (Sir John Betjemen) father, so if you are a regular here you’ll understand why it resonated with me. I think what’s so special about it is the honesty, there’s no hiding the grief felt by the poet here. One heartfelt expression from someone still grieving, is more helpful than a hundred people who’ve “been there”. You can feel it in the way he keeps returning to the gruesome imagery of decay and rot, I know how those thoughts can torment someone following a death. My mother wasn’t buried she was cremated, but for me the way she looked when I went to see her in the chapel of rest wouldn’t leave me. Several times a day every day for months, this image of her corpse would pop into my head. I was terrified just to go to sleep at night. It was horrific, she didn’t even look like the same person. They had tied her hair back in a ponytail, she never wore her hair like that. The state of mind of the poet mirrored my own at the time so closely, it’s remarkable really. The regret he expresses for things left unfinished also stuck with me, it was really helpful at the time and even reading it again nowadays I find it comforting.

I’ve spent way too much time just on these two books, when there’s a lot to get through. I tried with this daily poem idea, but I just couldn’t get anywhere. For a few months once I did read the suggested poem every day, and I felt nothing. It was a chore that I gained nothing from. Maybe I’ll be able to slow down mentally one day, and take my time and try to find what so many others can in poems. If I do, I imagine I will seek out a collection that touches on themes I care about already rather than a book like this one which seemingly has no consistent idea running through it. The poems inside could have been picked totally at random. I do have one more small collection of poems, it’s a tiny little thing. The Lord Tennyson edition of the English Poets in Pictures series. It’s a nice book, certainly the oldest I own as it was published in 1941, but after thinking about it I have decided I’ll be getting rid of it as well. I’m just not going to actually read it, I already know. If I were to keep it, it’d be as decoration, and I don’t want that.

Ok, moving on to something else now. I’m going to talk about the Harry Potter books. I own all seven, and this extra little book of short stories set in the same world. If I’m being honest I’d already made my mind up on these from the start, in fact it was me seeing them collecting dust recently that made me decide to finally do this clear out. I’m never going to read them again, and even if I do have kids one day I don’t think I’d want to give them these to read. Not that I’d have a problem with it, there’s nothing offensive or unhealthy for a developing mind in them, there’s just nothing especially meaningful or useful either. I’m not sure what the point of any of it is, what is the “message” you’re meant to take away from these books. Maybe something about friendship, I will say that because the books went on so long they were able to show friendship in a way that is quite unique. I think that, more than what some people speculate about how J. K. Rowling included a lot of traditional archetypes and ancient themes (possibly not entirely intentionally) or whatever, is what really appealed to so many people back when the Harry Potter phenomenon was really at it’s height.

See I was a little late for that, I went to a midnight release for the final book when I was about nine or ten with a friend of mine (and our parents of course) and I hadn’t even actually read all of them yet. I actually read the books in the wrong order, because I already knew the basic story outline from the films that were out at the time. It was that midnight release that got me interested in reading the books actually. I read the later books, then went back to read the ones which had films out already. By the time the “second phase” of Harry Potter mania was at it’s peak with the last film release I was already kind of over it. The time period where I was really a “fan” was in between these two moments in popular culture. What I remember appealing to me (at least consciously) wasn’t these ancient motifs that thousands of essays/ blogs and youtube videos might suggest as the reason behind the series’ success, but the little character moments.

These books are character driven ultimately, that’s what the common thread is between it and the thousands of other copycat stories in the torrential storm of crappy YA novels that followed the success of Harry Potter. There are also certain tropes, and story beats too, but the appeal really is in the characters. They feel like friends to a lot of the people reading. If I wanted to be snide I’d say they’re glorified soap operas, but that would be quite reductive as they’re obviously more than that (some anyway), I’ll say instead they both satisfy the same desire. Not only that, but they also all buy into this all too prevalent meme going around nowadays of the “relatable, flawed character”. That’s what I don’t like. I don’t mind character driven stories, or stories more generally speaking. By that I mean stories told for the sake of telling a good story, I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression earlier talking about how there didn’t seem to be any “message”, sometimes there doesn’t need to be. A good adventure tale is a perfectly valid thing.

In fact a good counter to the Harry Potter books (and all the copycats) as far as character driven fiction goes would be the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin. Of course, they’re better known as just the Game of Thrones books after the TV show (and first book) today. They are absolutely character driven, the very structure of the story is a series of POV style chapters named after the person whose perspective you’re getting. The style of writing is even slightly different in each case to further bring you into the specific inner world of each character. The collection of any one character’s chapters is usually a self contained story of it’s own, especially in the later books, but they also weave together and in that you see the complex nature of the feudal hierarchy that is fundamental to this story. Reading it you really get the sense of this delicate environment of unwritten rules about who can say what and to who and under what circumstances. The complexity of the world and specifically the relationships between everyone (which the show completely dropped after season 1, and could’ve done a better job of showing even then) is what makes these books so compelling.

Now there’s so much more to these books than that as well. The very presentation of such a political and social system is obviously also a way of him criticising it and others that he considers analogous. Which by the way I don’t necessarily agree with, in fact I think from what interviews I’ve seen and read I might quite fundamentally disagree with Martin on some crucial things. Religion, social organisation, human nature, politics, gender roles, all things that these books touch on. As I said though these books aren’t really about any of those things, rather Martin himself is about those things and therefore they can’t help but come out in this incredibly complex world he’s built. The world and plot come second to the characters and their development, it’s clear upon reading that even some major plot points that could have a crucial affect on the ending of the story were only thought up during the writing of the later books. Yet he’s had an outline of where the major characters will grow and develop from the start.

Now the characters in this story are certainly mostly “grey” in a sense, but I don’t think any of them can be considered relatable. In fact the attempt to make these characters this way in the show is one of the many reasons for why it has disappointed so many people. To be clear George is just as on board the bandwagon of hating on the traditional presentation of heroes and villains, morally perfect paragons of virtue fighting against real evil, because god forbid people have any kind of figure to aspire to emulate right? Nevertheless he doesn’t fall for the “flawed protagonist” and “sympathetic villain” memes, there are no main characters or antagonists really. There are characters who are set up to be, and then you end up in their head several books later. You’re not meant to have a favourite, if anything I think you’re meant to feel a bit alienated. This system the characters live in, it’s so different and the characters have a mindset that really does seem closer to people from the middle ages than people alive today. I’m not saying that the books are able to completely recreate the complexity of medieval courtly life but they do a pretty good job. Yes the characters might deal with insecurities and feelings and desires that people do today, but it expresses itself quite differently.

Now go back to Harry Potter, the characters are just like normal people, they’re your friends. They’re the people you grew up with, in more than one sense for a lot of people who were around a similar age as the characters when the books were coming out. Harry Potter is an archetypal “flawed protagonist” as are the major secondary characters (although weirdly enough, Voldemort is actually quite a traditional “truly evil” antagonist), they’re literally schoolkids who go through all the usual ups and downs that people go through at that age. Sure they’re thrust into these fantastical circumstances with all kinds of crazy creatures and bad guys to stop but that stuff is kind of secondary. In fact the surrounding plot and world seem to be even less important than in ASOIAF. J. K. Rowling just seems to have grabbed any and every kind of folkloric myth she comes across and shoved it all together. This is where all the ideas about her tapping into some kind of Jungian mind meld or whatever come from. It’s just not true though, the reason these books are so loved is not because a bunch of modern teens felt some kind of spiritual pull from witches and werewolves, it’s because in some sense they see the main characters as friends.

There’s this quote I remember hearing that was attributed to Nietzsche, but could be fabricated, it doesn’t matter really. It was about Thus Spoke Zarathustra his famous novel (which I haven’t read, in fact I’ve read nothing from Nietzsche) and he was talking about how he felt it had taken on a life of it’s own. The idea was that the book had grown beyond him, that when he read it back to himself he felt he gained a new insight. His own work, that he had written with great care as a means of expressing his own views, was now teaching him something new. I just thought it was funny, because the way people like me who haven’t actually read his work conceive of the man is as someone who everyone has a different interpretation of. The many different explanations of what he believed and was trying to say can sometimes seem wildly different, yet these people who might completely disagree with one another both on Nietzsche and everything else, both think that there’s something of great value to be found in his writings.

Now I’m not comparing ASOIAF to any great philosophical work, it is essentially just genre fiction and I know that any “real intellectual” would sneer at it just as much as they would at the Harry Potter books. All I want to say is that I see a very similar thing happening. There are a lot of blogs and youtube channels which are dedicated to talking about and analysing these books, on top of that there are a lot of political, philosophical and miscellaneous ones who have also made posts about them, and the interpretations vary quite a bit. For every worthwhile or interesting one there’s ten morons who have nothing of value to add (like me) but that’s the case even with actual “real profound works of literature” also. Even though George R. R. Martin himself is pretty explicit about his views, there are people who will argue that they interpret what the book has to say about things such as politics or philosophy entirely differently. The books have kind of outgrown him, and George isn’t just a guy who has opinions, he’s a guy who has strong opinions. He was an anti war activist in his youth and an atheism advocate, and many of his other short stories from the 70s are far more explicitly political. On the other hand J. K. Rowling from what little I do know about her seems like a very fair weather friend to any cause she associates herself with. She’s just on board with the consensus of her time for the most part, which for now is social progressivism and economic liberalism with cushions.

I think that this is why despite both books (or at least both stories) occupying a similar role in popular culture, one inspires all these interesting people to read and re-read the books and come up with all kinds of interpretations and the other does not. That’s why I’m not going to ever read the Harry Potter books again and will be giving them away, and why I am very much looking forward to the completion of the story of ASOIAF and will read them all again some day. I also realise now that I’m going to have to split this post up into more parts than I thought last week. I hope this was an enjoyable or interesting read.

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 3

Books: Part 1

I like to throw things away, to clear out clutter and old things I’ll never need or use, it’s quite satisfying. What’s funny is that I find cluttered environments can be very /comfy/, piles of old books and stacks of notes, weird ornaments, wooden chests or boxes lining the hall. I find bare and minimalist home interiors generally feel rather sterile and uninviting. Yet over the last four or five years I’ve been slowly (or more like in a few short frenetic sessions, spread months or years apart) turning my flat and my room in particular from the former into the latter.

When my mum passed away I moved into the room that had before been hers because my dad wasn’t willing to take it, and he moved into what had been my room until then. I had a lot of stuff, and it was over the few days it took to move everything that I really recognised how much crap I had. I’d been in that old room since the age of about 9, and along with bringing all my old toys and things from where I’d lived before I had collected quite a lot more. Wherever I was in there, a distraction was literally at hand at any moment. I could be lying on the floor in the middle of the room, or at my desk with the really old and slow desktop computer I used to have back then, or sitting on my bed, and just grab one of the books or action figures strewn across the floor.

The first things that had to go were all my toys, and this stage I suppose is pretty normal. Most kids reach an age where they decide it’s time to put childish things aside. Just like that line from the bible about becoming a man, and although I wouldn’t call myself a man even today I no longer saw myself as a boy either. Now it wasn’t easy to just discard these toys of mine because I’d developed quite a little universe for them to live in, every one of them had a story and they all had stories they shared together as well. I took them all together in a bag and gave it to my dad to take to the second hand shop, with this romantic idea in my head that they were going off together for more adventures, although in reality who knows. I imagine they were mostly sold separately.

I used to keep all of these toys in several plastic boxes (or at least I did in theory, as I said they spent most of the time everywhere in my room but the boxes), I had actually had them my entire life I believe. They were bought before I was born by my parents, blue, green and orange. I threw two of those away as well, and several other plastic boxes and containers that I had been keeping other things in, mostly stationery stuff like pens and pencils but also paint brushes and art supplies. So at some point, maybe now we’re at a year or just under since my dad moved in, I decided that all these boxes and what was in the ones that were still full all had to go as well. See I hadn’t actually used any of this stuff in years, I had long since lost interest in arts and crafts and that sort of thing. I was still taking art classes at school, and enjoying it for the most part, but in my own free time I had no desire to spend my time on that sort of thing.

I remember in particular I had these watercolour pencils which came in this lovely metal case and had a beautiful painting of a forest on one side, presumably that had been painted using the same pencils. I think they perfectly exemplify exactly what bothered me so much about all this stuff I had. As I said I like clutter, and “things”, but not just any old things. They have to be meaningful and valuable to me, not valuable in terms of market value or whatever (although the two may coincide, things that take more care or time to produce generally come at a greater cost) but rather in terms of how much I want to and am glad to own them. It’s not something that can really be measured or graded. The fact that I could so easily throw so many of my things away, shows how little value they had to me for example. It’s not that I’m unsentimental, I had memories attached to some of these things or at least they had been the decoration to my childhood, but that’s not quite the same thing. This is why the pencils are such a great symbol. I remember my mother buying them for me when I was very young. I remember the few times I had used them, and I remembered them always being there on the shelves, and when it came to it and I was throwing them out I did feel a tinge of melancholy. More importantly though, I knew that I wanted to be rid of them. It was like they were a weight, holding me down in the past.

Modern life is buying lots of things rather cheaply and then buying some more, if you’ll pardon my pretentious attempt at pithiness. That idea of value I was talking about, it’s hard to define no matter the circumstance but in the specific one I inhabit especially so. That being a modern, consumer capitalist, first world country.. or something idk. Ideally, I want to be proud of every single thing I own and glad to have it. When you’re surrounded by a sea of junk though it’s hard to identify and distinguish the things you value (in the sense that I’ve been using it so far) from everything else. This sentimentality for or attachment you have to a lot of stuff you grew up alongside just because it’s familiar can feel rather similar to the feelings you have towards something you truly value. These pencils are the perfect example because they really were of no value to me at all, if anything I had “negative” value for them as I wanted not to own them, and yet I found it hard to throw them away. I hadn’t used them in years, I never planned to again, yet it was still sad.

So that was good enough for me for quite some time, I had cleared out a lot of junk and things I didn’t use and also got rid of my toys. It wasn’t until a good couple years later that the urge to purge returned, but return it did. Now we’re in the summer break just after I had gone through the first year of my A-Levels (and dropped out, as I mentioned in the last entry) and I remember quite well I was just sitting in my room with nothing to do one afternoon and I started looking through all the piles of papers and textbooks that were piled up under my bed. See I’d just been throwing everything under there since I’d moved into the room. School textbooks, homework I’d forgotten to hand in, drawings and shitty poetry and weird notes I’d written to myself, just piles and piles of this crap. So I spent several hours a day, for a few days, going through it all and then immediately tearing it all up and putting in several huge bin bags to throw out. That wasn’t enough though, I looked at my old bed which I’d had for years and was starting to fall apart and I decided it should go as well. I took my dad’s screwdriver and I loosened all the planks one by one until there was just a pile of wood. I’ve slept with just a mattress on the floor ever since, so for about five years. I put a mat underneath it to keep it aired well and also I turn it over every weekend and change all the bedding of course.

So a pattern was developing where after a long period of time I’d throw away quite a lot and replace it with nothing. I had in my head this kind of pseudo-buddhist sounding idea that the attachment I had for these things was unhealthy and I did have a minimalist goal in mind. I felt like they were a liability, that the mere fact of owning something that could potentially be stolen or damaged made me weak. There were other things I threw away in a few other sessions like I’ve previously described. I got rid of a lot of old photographs, and I sold a lot of my old videogames and DVDs. I threw away a lot of clothes although I obviously did replace those, but now I have a much smaller and more deliberate wardrobe. I could do a whole separate post on the subject of clothing, frankly I’ve been meaning to since the early days of this blog but haven’t found the right way to do so, there is a lot more to talk about on the subject than you might initially think.

The one last thing I do need to mention though, before getting on to the actual task I had in mind before starting this post, is the books. I probably got rid of 60-70% of the books I owned, some time in 2014 I think. I threw away enough of them that I was able to also throw away the book shelf I was keeping them on and move what was left onto the other more general shelving unit I have. This was a little later down the line, and I had kind of dropped that minimalist ideal and was closer to the perspective I have now of just wanting to own only things I was proud of or glad to have. It was mostly children’s books to be honest, I don’t regret throwing any of them away, in fact I kept a lot more than I perhaps should’ve.

Which takes us to where we are today, see I threw away a lot of YA and younger children’s books which I’d been given and never read or only read once but not cared for much, but that’s mostly it. A lot of those kinds of books come in long series as I’m sure most people are aware, so for example I was really into these books when I was pretty young (maybe seven or eight years old) which were about the adventures of a kid called Jiggy McCue and his friends. Each book was a different adventure, and there were about ten or maybe more of these. Now that was a particularly big series, most of these were trilogies or sets of three or four, but after getting rid of all of these book series that I hadn’t read in years I realised how small my “library” really was. It was mostly just padding, the problem was the sentimentality which hadn’t stopped me before was harder to overcome this time, and because of it I kept some books which I know I’ll never read again (and as it’s unlikely I’ll have children of my own, so nor pass on to them) simply because of the fond memories I have from them.

Now it’s taken me a lot longer to just get to this point because I’ve been writing very little lately, and even though I’m no longer uploading a new post every week I still don’t want huge gaps between new posts, so I’ve decided to split this into two parts. There is one last thing that I was planning on talking about in this posts though so I’ll end this first part with that rather than going through the books and in part 2 I’ll do the sorting. My plan is (appropriately, given the title of this blog) not just to list the books I own, because that would make for a rather short post, but to use them as jumping off points to talk about various things.

Right, so all this talk about books lately, and specifically physical copies of books, has really made me think. See, from the time of the oldest examples of writing until as recently as two decades ago if you wanted to experience literature then physical copies of the work you are interested in were the only option for you. Nowadays, you can find most of what you may want to read online for free relatively easily. Of course, specialist things like maybe medical textbooks or very obscure works you might not be able to find, but most of the things that most people are interested in reading (even just among bookish types) are easy to find online. If not for free, then you can still save space and a lot of money by using an e-reader. For a lot of the reasons that one would choose to buy a book, going digital is objectively the better choice.

On /lit/ there was a thread recently where this guy claimed he had decided to “start with the greeks” and had spent nearly £1000 (or maybe dollars, I don’t remember) on Amazon ordering copies of various translations of classical works. Collected plays, history books, philosophical texts, and religious stuff. Now it’s highly likely that he didn’t actually do it, although what a fucking madman if he did, but still you do get a lot of people who will spend quite a bit all at once because they like the idea of owning and reading a lot of books more than they actually enjoy reading. Someone actually said something like that in the thread. Or at least, people who have this romanticised view of themselves after they make these purchases as autodidactic hermit philosophers, and I’ll be honest I’ve caught myself recently almost falling into the same trap.

The thing is, with these new cheaper and easier alternatives these people are revealed. If you really want to read as much as possible then why would you spend more money and time waiting for it to arrive or having to go to the bookstore yourself. It makes no sense at all, sure people give silly little explanations when pushed, like “staring at a screen too long, especially before bed, is bad” or that physical copies “feel nicer” but these are so transparent if thought about for more than a second. If physical copies are nicer you can still go to a public library, but well then you wouldn’t have a cool shelf to share a picture of in the weekly “bookshelf thread” on /lit/, and that just cannot be.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that bookish types/ bookworms are generally more withdrawn or reclusive people. I’m not able to actually justify that statement, but the stereotype is as old as Emperor Claudius at least if not older so that surely counts for something. So I understand that not only do people who spend more time at home want to make this environment they spend so much time in nice to look at and be in (as I said right at the start of this post, I also understand a big collection of old books and things can be cosy), and also that if they have a nice home environment then that can sort of retroactively justify them having not spent much as much time socialising and having fun with people in their youth than they perhaps wish they had. I understand that and I’m not attacking anyone, I just think that self awareness is important and we should think about why we want the things we want.

All I think is that bibliophilia is quite superficial, it’s an aesthetic choice, fetishism even. You don’t have to actually love literature or reading to “love” books, and these recent technological developments make it more clear. There’s only one argument I’ve heard that doesn’t feel completely hollow to me, and it’s funny because it’s also kind of built on the changes in technology that have taken place over the last few decades. See, nowadays we have more distractions than ever and it’s very easy to never end up finishing what you’re reading. You might have a PDF of a book on one tab and just leave it for months. If you actually spend quite a bit of your own money on a book on the other hand, perhaps that will make you more inclined to “get your money’s worth” so to speak. Anyway I’m not saying that buying and collecting books is a bad thing to do, I just think it’s good to think about these things.

Link to Part 2