Dear Library-of-my-dreams,

I have been collecting books for years with the intention to one day have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my dream library. It is a common dream for voracious readers and bookbuyers, and even among those who don't read so much but like the status or feel of a library.

Until that far-off day, I struggle to squish my collection onto the shelves I do have, regularly culling books, storing them in boxes and selecting which ones can stay another day on the shelf in prime position. Or which ones get hidden in stacks at the back where shameful books on self-help, astrology and pulp romances lurk.



Lately, as the medium of my reading habits is changing as dramatically as it is, my choices are becoming more rutheless. Why am I keeping this novel? I never re-read books, its not one of my favourites, and I am too scarred from years of loaned-out, unreturned books to share them anymore. And too lazy to cart them off to a second hand bookseller! Fewer and fewer novels -- read or unread -- are allowed to sit on my shelves. This space is premium real-estate, and ever since I moved interstate, it has been more important that those shelves house photos of friends and family who I rarely have the opportunity to see any more. My visual and inter-design aesthetic is changing.

So there is decreasing room on the shelf for books, nor any room in boxes under the house as I'd rather not endure the amount of shifting around of book-filled boxes of another move, should the day come when I decide to return to NSW, or my landlord wants his house back.

Cookbooks and beautiful illustrated or reference books still have pride of place, and my collections of fashion and ettiquette, fairy tale reference, New York, Titanic and Antarctic subjects (among others) continue.

But every day, the dream of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves becomes less relevant to me, even though my rate of reading is undiminished.

Dear Library-of-my-dreams, I don't think I want you anymore. Its not you, it's me. I think we are happier without each other. xBookFuzz