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AIBU?

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Original poster

DH thinks I’m being pretentious

346 replies

ramalamadingdong1 · 21/08/2018 23:25

This is so ridiculous but DH and I have been having a jokey arguement about this tonight and I think he IBU but I’m prepared to be told different.

I’ve recently bought a shelves for our living room and have started putting book on it. I’m an avid reader and fluentish in another language having studied it at university and lived in the country. I’ve put the English versions of the books I studied on the shelf and love getting them down to read parts of them.

My DH is not a reader and can’t understand this. However, a friend of his was round the other night and commented on the books. I explained I’d studied them at university in their original language and still enjoyed reading them albeit in English.

Tonight my DH laughingly said he thought I sounded pretentious going on about university and keeping these books on display. I only answered a question about them and there were plenty of other books there!

Now I’m wondering if I should just hide my books!

WIBU to display them?

OP posts:
JacquesHammer · 23/08/2018 22:04

I love books but dont feel the need to showcase my superior intellect

Where am I supposed to keep all my books that’s acceptable then?

XingMing · 23/08/2018 22:09

It's interesting that people who like books guessing that most of us are female have probably created libraries that represent our pasts.

There are books I particularly like that I have bought multiple copies of, to give to people who I think will love them. For example, I have a dear friend, married to a sheep farmer in NZ whom I have not met, and I sent her back with a copy of a book about a shepherd in the Lake District where I have not been, only driven through, for him.

KERALA1 · 23/08/2018 22:09

Genuinely never occurred to me that having books is "showing off" Hmm. Ours all in our study where a casual visitor wouldn't go so we would look like a book free home but aren't

Xenia · 23/08/2018 22:14

It is not as if most of us put them in display cabinets with lights pointed on the particular learned tomes or the £50k first editions and point them out to visitors. Instead they are just there on bookshelves like many homes. When our parents died the task that was hardest was dividing up their book collections although we did it amicably as it felt the most important and personal of tasks (the photographs in albums I could just get copied for us all so that was easier). I didn't take anything like as many as my siblings as I have loads of books already and had 5 children to house too but I still have a lot.

I do regularly clear stuff out and decide what I want to keep and what to get rid of. Eg this summer I got rid of my 1980s university books except for one. Those took me almost 40 years to get rid of. I once with my twins got rid of about half their books which were stacked to the ceiling and double stacked on their book shelves which was better because they could suddenly see what they had and we kept the better nicer ones so I am not against sorting out books but I would not want to be without them. I tend to buy new ones and give them to charity once read if I don't think I will read them again but if they're good keep them for a second read in due course.

TatianaLarina · 23/08/2018 22:29

If a book’s worth reading once it’s worth reading twice. I only get rid of books that are bad, boring or fluff.

MaisyPops · 23/08/2018 22:34

People who think it’s pretentious either can’t relate to the genuine love of books, or feel envy/insecurity
I agree. If people enjoy books, music, vinyls etc then why not have them out?

The exception is if the book case is exclusively (or almost exclusively) stacked with 'display' books, lots of books that haven't been read. E.g. if someone has the complete works of Satre in a beautiful hardback and then can't talk at all about any of Satre's ideas then they are being a pretentious twat.

(Reminds me of a family event when my cousin spotted someone wearing a reasonably niche band t shirt so struck up conversation about the band and genre to make small talk. It was clear the person had listened to 3 singles of the band and knew nothing of the genre and was the male version of teen cool girls who love one direction currently wearing Iron Maiden tops because it's a cool image)

Karen49 · 23/08/2018 22:40

Whaaat, of course YNBU , have every right to be proud of your achievements, and talk about when asked

ToeToToe · 23/08/2018 22:42

We are people who have a house full of bookshelves too.

They contain volumes from Bridget Jones, Dan Brown & Harry Potter to Paradise Lost and Homer's The Iliad. Plus Captain Underpants & whatnot.

I read all manner of books from Jane Austen to Jackie Collins.

I love books. Loving books is not pretentious.

But when the health visitor came to our house in 2008, she commented on how unusual it was to have bookshelves, how much she liked seeing it, and how many houses don't have a single bookshelf.

TatianaLarina · 23/08/2018 22:47

When I go into houses with no books I feel slightly panicked.

AynRandTheObjectivist · 23/08/2018 22:48

Love my books, but love my Kindle too. The words are the same, I can buy and start reading it as soon as I decide I want to, I can take unlimited numbers of books with me anywhere I go.

You can always get the dead tree version too, it's just with a Kindle you don't need to wait for it to arrive or lug it around everywhere if you're going to be away.

-and I can secretly read trash and filth

Lethaldrizzle · 23/08/2018 23:03

I don't think the op's dh was saying all books are pretentious by any means

slithytove · 23/08/2018 23:19

I’m not keen on the comments about books on display - if we had a visitor to the house who was a newish friend, or a HV etc they prob wouldn’t enter the garage, or study, or kids bedrooms, or attic where the books are. 2000+ of them. So we would be judged and found lacking.

slithytove · 23/08/2018 23:22

Plus I’m trying my best to replace my personal books with ebooks due to sheer lack of space

Underpressure101 · 23/08/2018 23:28

Surely pretention is trying to show off about something you DON’T do? If you’d put them up there in the foreign language but had no knowledge of language in order to show off your apparent intellectualness THAT would be pretentious. Putting a book you have read (in any language) and still enjoy having is just what normal intelligent people do. Telling them they are pretentious is what their husbands do when they feel a bit threatened and out of their depth....

tolerable · 23/08/2018 23:34

my big sister had "coffee table book" on her wish list one xmas....i knew what she meant.but in ours,at the time it was "argos"catalog. its your home,your life..pretentious would be book covers on cereal boxes no?

bigreadernobooks · 23/08/2018 23:41

JacquesHammer: I felt utterly the same until I acknowledged that I no longer had to pack 14 actual books for a fortnight’s holiday

It was decades ago, but I can still remember the horror of trying to find an English language book in Athens on a winter's Sunday when everything seemed to be closed.

Bugjune · 23/08/2018 23:45

My attic is filled with boxes upon boxes of books, you'd judge me very wrongly if you walked into my bookless sitting room.

Aus84 · 23/08/2018 23:56

I have a downstairs bookshelf in the main living room filled with books of all different genres. We have a lot of guests staying from a couple of nights to a couple of weeks due to living away from our home towns. The books are for them, kind of like a selection of books you might find at a holiday house. I hope I'm not judged based on those titles!

I keep my books in my room. I don't display them as they would make my room dusty over time.

OP, you are not being pretentious at all. You should fill your home with things that make you happy everyday. Whether its photos, artwork, plants, books.

NotTerfNorCis · 23/08/2018 23:58

God he sounds like my partner. I have hundreds of books in various languages. DP was scathing about them for a long time. Used to say their only value was pulp or toilet paper. He obviously felt they were a judgement on him, as a non-reader. Fortunately he's calmed down a lot since then.

SlothSlothSloth · 24/08/2018 00:03

Oh god how could you love someone this proud of his ignorance?

MerryMarigold · 24/08/2018 00:09

Did he vote for Brexit?

blueyacht · 24/08/2018 01:49

I can’t see the point of keeping books on display unless you’re trying to show people how well read you are. I’ve only reread a novel once in my life so I can’t be bothered keeping fiction books and I get rid of them. I can understand keeping reference books but they’re in the loft.

bubblegumunicorn · 24/08/2018 07:09

I wouldn’t even think uni was pretentious at least these days it’s a right of passage most of my friends went to uni! Not sure if it’s just my generation 🤷‍♀️ I would say talk to him though if it’s something he wishes he had done and feels sad that you did and he didnt it’s worth having the conversation!!

JassyRadlett · 24/08/2018 07:29

I can’t see the point of keeping books on display unless you’re trying to show people how well read you are.

Erm... where am I supposed to keep them then? I know you don’t like rereading but you get that other people do, yes? And keep them for others to read, especially as the kids get older.
I have floor to ceiling shelves in the living room and dining room, plus two 8x2 Kallaxes in the bedroom that are mostly books. Each of the kids has a packed bookcase, and the study has a built in bookcase/desk that goes to the ceiling.

My tiny loft wouldn’t cut it, even if I would hate not having easy access to my books.

And as for reference books, I don’t see the point in having them unless it’s reasonably simple to pull one down and look something up in one, or browse through if the mood takes you.

It’s a really interesting divide: those who see books on shelves as being ‘on display’ v those who see them as ‘stored conveniently’. My books aren’t on shelves for others to look at. They’re for me and my family to use on a daily basis.

hdh747 · 24/08/2018 07:40

It's funny how people judge us by the tiniest detail. I once had a young lady comment on the solitary apple in our fruit bowl that we weren't 'big fruit eaters then?' - and it was very clearly a judgement on our, presumably, unhealthy eating habits. I simply replied, honestly, that it was market day, we have 2 local markets a week and I like to buy fresh each market day rather than stock up at a supermarket. I could visibly see her both swallow a little piece of humble pie, and decide we were 'more her sort' after all. Which was silly because twice weekly foray to the market could have been for a wee bag of apples and sod all else, not actually true but..

There are loads of books I have read that I don't keep, because I know I'm unlikely to read them again. Books I keep for all sorts of reasons. Books on my kindle. And a shed load of chargers on our bookshelves among the books, because that's where I keep stuff I want to grab a lot. Plus a few other handy odds and ends. Make of it what you will lol.

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