Is it normal to keep buying books even when you have plenty?

[MsGreying]

People often ask me why I'm always buying more books. The truth is, I have a genetic condition where my body doesn't produce books on its own, so I have to supplement.

Oh, I need the Index book now.

My youngest is 15 and I piled up the Hairy McLairy books recently, to pass on... and I couldn't do it 😅

I was proud of myself for re reading and then carefully donating 34 books to charity before Christmas. Since then I suspect I've acquired just as many, if not more.

You can run a bookshop for a day on Airbnb but it’s booked up for years.

Barter Books is indeed lovely.

We have Collected in Durham which only stocks booked by women. They also have lovely cakes. They do loyalty cards and you get a stamp per book. When you've got 10 stamps you get a free drink and cake. Filling a card makes me very happy for both the books and the cake. It's a fantastic shop.

Barter Books is amazing. Always come out with loads of books

I suffer from this complaint. I have hundreds of books to read but still buy more and borrow from the library. I don't think I will ever read them all. I may be nuts.

Ooh I like a quirky book. I have a history of the ice cream van that I found in Hay on Wye. It goes well with my American history of jello cookery book.

Plenty isn't the same as enough and you can never have enough books. 📒📓📙📘📚

Thank you for this reminder to get off my bloody phone and finish my books (two on the go at the same time, or three if "teach yourself portuguese" counts!)

1 million percent this. Buying more books is never a wrong thing to do 😁

Barter Books is like being in heaven and they have a nice cafe too.

Hurrah for this thread. So many people don’t realises that the usual “recommended” levels of reading are too low and should instead be supplemented to your own level of happiness/satisfaction. I am grateful that it’s impossible to overdose with this condition, although it does have a detrimental effect on my bank account. I have to carefully manage the two and remind myself it’s a marathon not a sprint. (I will admit I have suffered injuries when I’ve dropped my iPad on my face in bed.) Also I also suspect cat ownership is a co-morbidity of this condition.

Im currently annoyed that the “collections” facility on the iPad kindle app doesn’t allow for sub collections and endless methods of indexing etc.

(apologies for spag errors esp on this thread! Not very well. Appreciated the use of “fewer”.)

I'd be questioning my relationship with anyone who didn't at least try to understand the seriousness of this condition.

Yes as long as you know you're going to get round to reading them eventually.

Yes. Never too many

Sorry to shock you all, but I do remember some Philistine MNer saying that to her, books were ‘clutter’. 😱

I am like this!
I used to live in the North East so I went to Barter Books a lot. There's also the Tynemouth Station Book Fair (you can google it, they have a website) which happens a few times a year and the Whitley Bay Scouts have had an annual fundraising book fair for years. Well worth a visit for anyone in the area.
I bought the vast majority of my books from those places and I absolutely loved it.

Now I live abroad in a non-english speaking country but I've discovered a few websites specializing in second-hand books which are good value for money which have a lot of English books. Because it's more difficult to find reasonably priced books (because new ones here can be very expensive), I tend to go into panic mode and regularly trawl the websites to see if there are any books available I'm interested in. That means the TBR stack keeps expanding.
Another problem I have is that one book might inspire the purchase of another - eg. if it's non-fiction I might want to read more on the topic or read a book on something mentioned so off I go, back on the websites and then of course, I want free shipping so I have to reach the minimum purchase price for that...

In my family and friendship group we don't do Christmas or birthday presents any more so I wrap up a lot of the books I buy during the year and give them to myself on my birthday and Christmas Day. By the time they come round I've forgotten what I've bought so it's always a great surprise and I still get excited in the days before looking forward to seeing which books I got!

Unfortunately I've got into jigsaw puzzles in the last couple of years and now I have the same issue there.

Probably me.
I posted above about getting rid of 1000s of paperbacks. All read once and never to be read again. I only read e books now.
Getting rid of multiple bookcases made my whole house feel bigger. Definitely clutter. If that makes me a philistine so be it.

I don't do this, I love to start a new book while I'm still in the post purchase excitement phase.

If i don't start it straight away, chances are I'll never get round to it.

But in buying all these books, we're all practicing the Japanese art of Tsondoku, so that must be worthwhile?

This makes it sound civilised and respectable @Bjorkdidit I like it!

a history of the ice cream van
Added to my wish list 🤣

I shouldn’t be allowed in bookshops. Always something to look at.

Obviously.

Yes. This is a normal feature of being a book person. As long as you are reading some of them.