16. Owning Books

Following several other #blogjune peeps (sorry - will identify later!), I'm posting a photo of my book collection, which also happens to be my cookbook collection. Yep, I only own cookbooks (oh and some language learning books), and even this collection is moving towards obsolete. It's funny, because as a kid I had loads of books and my parents' house is still full of books (and soooo much other stuff - mum's a textile artist), but my apartment is totally minimal. Even this cookbook collection lives inside a cupboard.

I do read a lot. I work at a public library supplier and have access to pretty much every new book that ends up in a public library in my state. I may or may not have taken a book home, read it overnight, brought it back to work and catalogued it, then sent it on its way once or twice... Who could resist, right? The other thing about working there is that I can purchase books at cost price. But I don't - except as gifts for other people. 

I think for me, the attraction of reading books is reading them, not possessing them, and I usually only read a book once. I do like the way books can make a home look cosy and inviting as well as being a design feature, but somehow I haven't been interested in doing that with my home. I've got a lot of books on my Kindle, I read library books on Overdrive, and I visit the public library coming home with a stack once or twice a month, and I use the State Library's VDX service to order books I want to read, but I very rarely buy a book any more. If I had children, a bigger house, more money, no access to libraries, it might be a different story though! I'll always need books of some description in my life :)

So... why is my cookbook collection becoming obsolete? Well, there's an app for that. I've got most of my favourite recipes stored in Paprika now, and discover new ones on there too. A fabulous app which I'm also using for meal planning and grocery shopping. 

Which do you do more - buy books or borrow them?