There is hardly a day goes by without someone bemoaning the fact that people don’t read books anymore. Do they mean books or novels? Do they mean that people aren’t reading at all? But is this really the case? I very rarely read a book these days but I am still an avid reader of novels. Although no iPad or Kindle can replace those gorgeous hardbacked children’s picture books and special interest; aka “coffee table”; books, I much prefer to read on my iPad; so much easier to handle than a book, I can read into the night without disturbing Paul since I don’t need to have the light on, it automatically bookmarks where I left off when I fall asleep, the pages will never fall out and best of all I can take my extensive library with me wherever I go. But books are where my love for reading started as I was recently reminded.

Standing by the Darwin statue in the shadows of the grand building that is Shrewsbury library I was waiting for my sister to catch up with me. As I glanced up at the sandstone walls I was transported back in time. A brief but sweet nostalgic moment, memories of childhood visits to the equally grand Nottingham Central Library. The swish of the heavy, brass and glass revolving doors as they created a personal transport pod into the cavernous foyer, where even the echoes were hushed. The wide marble staircase with polished brass handrails leading up to the main library. There row upon row of olive green book shelves were guarded by a stern, middle aged lady, wearing a tweed skirt and twinset, looking down from an elevated counter with a disapproving air as she twiddled with the glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. Whilst my granny disappeared into this forbidden realm, to children anyway, I was left to make my way through the heavy oak door leading to the basement where the children’s library was situated. My shoes would squeak on the green marbled Lino floor as I navigated my way around a veritable labyrinth of shelves with books on just about every subject a child could wish for. My nerves all of a fizz with the anticipation of where the next story would take me I would find my way through this maze to the fiction section. From there I could borrow the means to travel the universe, having countless adventures along the way. My love, you see, was not for the books just because they were books, it was; and still is; for the stories contained within.

If you walk into my house now though you won’t see my shelves brimming with books. What you will find, throughout the house, is a small eclectic collection, all of them read at some time or another, which has accumulated over many years. The front room is Paul’s domain so here you will find books on cars, aircraft, mechanics, radio frequencies, paint, colour theory, sign making with the odd Beano or Roblox Annual lurking alongside the textbooks and workbooks we use for home educating the grandchildren. In the dining room half the surface area on the G-Plan Welsh dresser is occupied by our well thumbed cookery books, although I do now have quite a recipe collection on my iPad as well. Upstairs in the study and my sitting room you will find An Oxford Companion To Music cosied up to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; a dog eared copy of Shakespeare’s Collected Works snuggled up to Soft Furnishing Ideas; an out of date Lippincott’s Manual Of Medical/Surgical Nursing nudging a Dexter Omnibus edition; a biography of Johnny Cash jostling with a book of Stanley Kubrick’s photography 1945-1950 and Pride and Prejudice standing proud alongside Prick Up Your Ears. And, if you look hard enough you might find, tucked amongst them, saved since childhood, a very old copy of Peter Pan, held together with equally ancient sellotape. I have even self published a couple of children’s picture books and a book of anecdotes about the adventures my sister and I have had over the last decade. So you see, I still love books but I am much more discriminating in the ones I buy and keep. What you won’t find are many paperbacks. I have, however retained a few, such as my first copy of A Clockwork Orange which sits next to a later publication of the novel, bought because the pages of the original are now so delicate with age I daren’t open it. I don’t want it to go the same way as a long out of print 1960’s edition of a Perry Mason novel when I tried to re-read it. The crisp, tobacco brown pages crumbled to dust in my hands the second I opened the cover. I keep it mainly to show that I did indeed read it when I was a teenager before it and the film were banned. I have also kept a few select paperbacks of novels I enjoy re-reading; Tom Holt springs to mind; and don’t want to pay for them again until I have to. So, as you see, books will always have a place in my life but not in the same way they used to.

So, are people reading less? I don’t think so, perhaps they, like me, are reading in a different way.