Larry

Although I do my utmost to encourage others to use public libaries, I am guilty of neglecting them myself. The main problem I have is that the books have to be returned! I'm ashamed to admit I tend only to visit libraries to check out the withdrawn stock (which does provide money I suppose).

Just finished my eighth encounter with Keith Waterhouse. The Bucket Shop (1968) was his fourth novel and not quite up to the standard of the previous three (This Happy Land and Billy Liar are particularly great). It's all a bit too familiar. The hero is a decidedly unheroic philanderer and proprietor of an unsuccessful junk shop. He moves from one casual affair to the next and at one point (rather like the hero of Billy Liar) finds himself stringing along two women at the same time, besides his wife. It's very nicely written and often very funny but feels a bit dated now. Kingsley Amis was the chief exponent of this kind of thing but Waterhouse was at least his equal and probably easier to read (and less chauvinistic).

Sounds like you've got it all figured out so there's not much point my trying to deter you. Just make sure you never add Keep the Giraffe Burning by John Sladek to your collection. It's the worst thing I've ever read!

I was afraid somebody might ask me how many I've read! To be completely honest, I don't think I've read a thousand in my entire life (including kids books). One would naturally assume that I purchase as many as I do in order to satisfy a voracious reading habit. However, it's more a combination of boredom, a lifelong love of books and the luxury of having as much choice as possible (even to the point of being spoilt for choice) that has resulted in my having so many. Plus, once read I never part with them. I can't say I am an especially fast reader. In recent weeks I have read seven or eight quite skinny volumes, mainly just to increase my pitiful tally for the year so far. Fifty-six might not sound too disgraceful but with the amount of pressure I place on myself, I.e. by buying more and more all the time, I feel like I should always be reading more in order to justify having so many. Incidentally, I do actually enjoy reading. My relentless book-buying is not purely a mad compulsion. I'm definitely more a bibliophile than a bibliomaniac. As for the way they're kept, it's all a matter of necessity I'm afraid. To see them all on bookshelves would be like a dream come true. As it stands, everything is very orderly and I'm able to find what I want but ultimately books belong on bookshelves. Unfortunately I would need a place with at least two decent sized spare rooms to accommodate the amount of shelving required so I guess it's probably never going to happen.

Don't say that, Frankie. You'll only discover I'm a false prophet. Following my example will bring you poverty, frustration and constant fear for the well-being of the floorboards!

Strangely enough I can put my hands on anything I'm after...it just might take a while. You see, I haven't got a single book on a single shelf! (The 200-plus DVDs occupy the shelves) They're all in various boxes (about 45, mainly veg boxes) and drawers. I keep certain author's works together in a specific box or drawer, so I do have a system. Of course, it constitutes an inpromptu workput every time I try to retrieve something because it will invariably be in the box at the bottom that has six others stacked on top of it, or right at the back of the wardrobe, but I always get it. If I didn't have a system I'd never be able to find anything and it would be kind of pointless having so many (if it isn't already).

Just finished another very peculiar work by the highly original James Purdy, entitled I Am Elijah Thrush. The whole thing has a sort of dreamlike quality to it. I'm already struggling to recall much of it to mind. He was a very gifted writer and I was particularly taken with the dialogue in this novel. It's completely unlike anything written in the last century - more like something from several hundred years ago, and certainly preferable to the way we tend to speak in real life. Especially nowadays. It's all a bit warped but I'd recommend anything of Purdy's to a reader seeking something a little offbeat.

That shows an admirable restraint on your part. Please don't ruin it by following my example. I'd hate to see my mania used to justify reckless and gratuitous book-buying. May my example be a warning to you all!

I haven't posted on this forum for ages (more fool me) and I suspect this comment may have quite an impact! My book-buying mania is so completely out of hand, I cannot give an exact figure as to how many I own; not even to the nearest five hundred. About two and a half years ago a fairly rough estimation suggested I had four and a half thousand. That would suggest (on an even rougher estimate) I have between five and six thousand now. Yes, you needn't point it out, it's obvious even to me: I'm insane! I've recently started transferring my written catalogue on to spreadsheets so give me three or four years and I shall get back to you with a more definitive answer...by which time the collection will have grown even more and the ceiling finally given way (but for a few hundred in the attic, they're all in one room!).

Cakes and Ale is finished (and terrific it was too). Now I'm on to Herself Surprised, the first part of a trilogy by Joyce Cary, written in the 1940s.

I tend to use old train tickets as bookmarks and I also have an old bus ticket which I've been using for five years. It's one of those season ticket ones stuck on to a strip of card which the driver then stamps until it's full. Transport is so costly, I don't like the thought of simply abandoning one's used tickets. I feel I need to get my money's worth by giving them another function.

I have about 45 pages remaining of Cakes and Ale by Somserset Maugham. It is my third encounter with him, having previously read The Painted Veil and The Moon and Sixpence, both of which I was extremely fond of. He's incredibly easy to read, which may account for how long and successful his writing career was.

I got about three quarters of the way through To Kill a Mockingbird before finding there was a page missing. I couldn't locate a copy anywhere online (this was quite a few years ago) so I had to hold off until I could visit the nearest city, visit Waterstones and locate a copy. It wasn't hard to find one but unfortunately, being a new edition, the layout of the book was different to the one I'd been reading and the page I wanted wasn't where I'd expected it to be. Still, I managed to find it and read it. There's no way I could have just skipped it and the same goes for any book.

If he did, it was unusually optimistic by Orwell's standards. By his own admission, Nineteen Eighty-Four was as gloomy as it was largely because of the illness he was suffering at the time.

I'm 50 pages into the fourth part of Yukio Mishima's The Decay of the Angel, the final part of his quartet, The Sea of Fertility. I read the first three (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn) earlier this year and greatly enjoyed them, the second part especially. However, I opted to break off after part three and now four months have elapsed, which is a longer gap than I had intended. It isn't absolutely essential to recall all that happened in the previous parts (the story jumps forward quite a few years and thus far features only a few characters from the earlier novels) but I can't help wishing I'd resumed it sooner, when it was all a bit fresher in my mind. I'm sure it would have been beneficial.

Roy Orbison - You Got It. I was only 8 years of age but I liked the song so much and was so saddened by Orbison's early death only weeks after recording it, I was compelled to make my first vinyl purchase.

I really liked Coming Up for Air. I read it about six years ago and still remember it well. As you stated Janet, it isn't a happy novel. I personally prefer pessimistic works to optimistic or overtly propagandist novels. However, I'm not sure I would've relished reading this had I been alive at the time it was published. Orwell wrote it in Morocco during the winter of 1938-39, while recuperating from a serious illness. Meanwhile, war clouds gathered in Europe and the threat of impending war hangs over the novel. Indeed, it was published in June 1939, three months before the outbreak of hostilities. By and large, I would say that Orwell was a more accomplished journalist and essayist than a novelist. However, Coming Up for Air holds up very well. Better than his earlier novels, A Clergyman's Daughter, Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and (in spite it's own gloominess) easier to take than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm is probably his most accessible work but is a novella rather than a novel and was intended as a polemic rather than a straightforward piece of satire.

I'm a research scientist named Griffin. I've discovered a forumula for making myself invisible and I'm standing behind you right now!

Finally got around to reading The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. It's an incredibly easy read. I began it at about 1am this morning, read for a couple of hours and I'm already past the half way mark. It is, of course, one of the seminal pieces of science fiction but is in many ways closer to Wells's social comedies. It's very light-hearted and funny.

Oh dear, you've just reminded me that I've had this book for over twelve years and still haven't read it. My parents bought it for me on my 17th birthday and it is now languishing in the loft. I'm sure it wouldn't take me too long to get through as I'm already quite familiar with Che's life and legacy, but, as you said Book Fiend, it is a really big book! I can't say that I read much auto/biography. There just aren't all that many people I want to know about. Of course, that hasn't stopped me stockpiling a fair quantity of those that do interest me and the vast majority have one thing in common: they're all by or about people who are either dead or well on their way. Living people just don't seem to have the same appeal to me as dead ones! I certainly find no appeal in reading about today's modern celebrities, whose ghost-written works clog up the biography shelves. It's bad enough seeing them on TV without reading about their first 25 years as well. Of those auto/biographies I have actually got around to reading, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a compelling and eloquently written work. Isaac Deutscher's Stalin was quite brilliant (I haven't read all of his trilogy on Trotsky). Fred Kaplan's biography of my literary hero, Gore Vidal was wonderfully exhaustive and does justice to its subject. Andrei Gromyko's Memories should have been more interesting than it was, given that in his fifty years on the world stage he surely met more world leaders than anybody else in history. A few people have mentioned Charlie Chaplin's autobiography. I read this some years ago and thought it was fascinating inasmuch as the subject himself was such an extraordinary man but I don't feel he gave very much away. I have a fondness for reading about great comedy figures, perhaps because their private lives often tend to contrast sharply with their public persona's. Among those I'd recommend are: Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy by John McCabe, On the Way I Lost It by Frankie Howerd, Hancock by Freddie Hancock and David Nathan, Just Williams by Kenneth Williams and Bud and Lou: The Abbott and Costello Story by Bob Thomas. Among those amassed auto/biographies that I would like to read in the foreseeable future are: A Life in Our Times by John Kenneth Galbraith Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant The Real Life of Anthony Burgess by Andrew Biswell Out of Place by Edward Said The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy by Simon Louvish The Time of My Life by Denis Healey Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx My Life by Leon Trotsky Iris: A Memoir by John Bayley A Sort of Life by Graham Greene High Spirits by Joan Sims Within Whicker's World by Alan Whicker John Steinbeck: A Biography by Jay Parini How I Grew by Mary McCarthy My Silent War by Kim Philby Karl Marx by Francis Wheen My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel Palimpsest by Gore Vidal Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life by Peter Conrad Alexandra Kollontai by Cathy Porter Morecambe and Wise by Graham McCann Plus, I'd like to squeeze in some of the really celebrated biographical works, such as The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, The Education of Henry Adams, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau's Confessions, Words by Jean-Paul Sartre, Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov and Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. I guess that would be enough to be going on with!

29, 30 next spring, which is about the age people thought I was a decade ago. It was something I got used to but it was never very pleasurable being told "God! I thought you were older than that" or "you mean you're younger than me?" from somebody five years my senior. The worst incident must have been when a woman, clearly not in the first flush of youth, asked if I was somebody she had been at school with! Nobody seems to comment any more though so I don't know whether I've aged into my face (or into my mature manner, as my kind sister suggests) or people presume I'm clocking 40 and don't bother to question it.

Finally, The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. I've been wanting to read it for ages because it has such a great reputation. I began it yesterday and already I am halfway through. It is written as a series of diary entries so it is very easy to get through. I suspect I shall complete it by the end of today.

Mine feel exactly the same way. Of course, I laugh it off, but then I am not the one who will be sitting directly beneath should it in fact give way. To be more specific, that person will be my dad! Book Fiend, do you find that when you've collected everything on one of those lists you start thinking, well, that's it! Barring this or that I might buy along the way, I've got enough to be going on with, so now I might actually start getting through some of them...until you find a new list or encounter a new author whose entire output needs acquiring and so you start all over again? And yes, FOPP is great for books, as well as DVDs (which I also have a mania for collecting) and music. Alas, there are now only nine FOPP stores in the UK but happily there's one in Nottingham, which is close to where I live. Earlier this year I picked-up a load of history books by Eric Hobsbawm, all

I read this some years ago and found the opening two or three chapters to be among the most engrossing openings I have ever read. I'd hate to say the rest of the novel is an anti-climax but I felt that the beginning was so brilliantly written, the imagery so striking, that McEwan was at pains to top it.

Thank you for justifying my existence, Chrissy. It's a psychological thing though, isn't it? I wouldn't dream of going into a bookshop and buying something from new for about