I can’t stop buying books – perhaps I’ll get round to reading them one day

Buying books is a completely different hobby to reading books. I enjoy both but prefer the former, writes Rupert Hawksley

Books provide a sort of permanence in your life (Getty/iStock)

Whenever I feel sad or listless at the end of the day I take the tube to Green Park and walk up Piccadilly to Waterstones. There is also Hatchards on the way. I browse, pick things up and put them down again. It usually takes about half an hour before I decide to buy a book but after that almost everything that catches my eye comes home with me. Sometimes that means six or seven books; often a lot more. Almost none of them will be read.

At other times, I spend and spend on Amazon and when the parcel arrives, I can hardly remember what I ordered. At lunch, I will pop out to the local charity shops and buy greasy paperbacks and cheap editions of classics. There is an Oxfam not far from where I live that seems to stock every major contemporary novel, just a year or so after it was published. And so my room fills up with piles of books; boxes of the things clutter my childhood bedroom; needless to say, moving house is hell.

Buying books is a completely different hobby to reading books. I enjoy both but prefer the former. This might sound self-defeating. Why buy a book you won’t read? Good question. All I know is that I get an odd tingle in my stomach, a strange little high, when I start splurging. The more I spend, the more giddy I become. It’s addictive and I’m sure a therapist would have something to say about it.

I think it might have something to do with hope. I like the idea of having read all these books, not because I would particularly enjoy flaunting how well read I am (though that might be fun), but because it would, genuinely, be a thrill to have all these stories, all that knowledge, in my head. And I could! Buying the books feels like the first step, a short cut. Every time I leave a bookshop, I really do believe I will read what I have bought. This time it will be different, I tell myself.

But I wonder if there is something else going on. Books provide a sort of permanence in your life. They don’t really go in and out fashion. I am not someone who ever throws a book out or takes the “read” pile (I do sometimes read) back to the charity shop. The books I buy will stay with me, hauled in boxes from place to place. When I returned from Abu Dhabi a few years ago, I sold almost everything bar the books I had bought out there, which I shipped back to the UK at great expense.

Perhaps buying books is a strange sort of nesting process. You take them home with you and they become part of that home. A solid set of foundations. And in that way, I suppose, they also chart one’s life. I wanted that then. I bought that there.

As any addict will tell you, you can never quite have enough of your particular vice. There isn’t a last hit. Not unless you really want there to be. So the stacks just continue to get higher and higher. But I think that’s OK.

Yours,

Rupert Hawksley

Senior commissioning editor, Voices