I have decided to become a book blogger

I think actually the books themselves have decided this.  They are everywhere in this house.  They live in sheds outside too. There is not a surface covered from the weather in and around our house where a book does not recline.  When someone decides to tidy them away, hey presto, more books take their seats.  Here is total book anarchy. They follow no rules of shelving, as to genre, alphabet or even size.  I was looking at them, and they were looking back, when suddenly I got the idea - I feel, I am sure, that they want me to blog about them.  I am going to talk about them, but I will not be reviewing them, not in the normal sense, anyway.  Each book here feels it is, an individual, and so I will treat them that way.  Every day I will pull a few books off my staggering shelves and talk about them.  Some I have read; many more, I plan to read; some I just hope to read but recognise that I may never do so.  But I can justify their existences by writing about them.

You know the joke about the person who can't think of a present for a friend, certainly not a book, because she has one of those?  That is one sort of person who won't be interested in this blog.  Then there are people like a neighbour of mine, who spends some days reading a book, following which he immediately unloads it onto someone else.  He has a coffee table with a tenancy of about three books, changing all the time. He does not understand how you can be fond of a book, as an item.  He has one he is reading, one he is going to read, and one that has outstayed its welcome, but will be gone as soon as he can get rid of it.

Books are a tradition in my family.  Not for literary reasons, though.  For books to read we went to the library. But as a hobby, my mother and my aunt went to auctions.  They frequently bought joblots, in many of which books figured largely.  I recall many days through the years when trunks, boxes, bags of books were delivered by the local auctioneer's man to our front door.  We pored through them for hours, admired them, but rarely read them.  Some were valuable.  Most were not.  Many have found their way to my house.   Mostly, however they are not fiction.  I find it hard to read fiction, and only then short books. So the only fiction in the main are so-called classics, a few additional solated favourites, and books in particularly  beautiful editions. Non-fiction books are my thing.  I stand holding a book on shoemaking, painting, handreading, meteorology, and I am the owner of these mysteries.  Or so I like to think, if I were only to start at the beginning of these books and follow through to the end.  These books empower.  In my case, they could empower. It is the possibilities within their covers that entrance me.  That is why they share my home. And that is why I want to write about them.