A changing philosophy of books

There was a time when my way of getting books was rather like conspicuous consumption.

I would go to B. Dalton or the Book Vault, see all of these paperbacks on sale, and just fill a large shopping bag with them. Mostly they were literary titles -- Signet and Pengin classics, AP prep materials -- that I hadn't read yet. I did luck out once and find multiple collections of short stories by L. M. Montgomery. That would have been around 1996, because I remember which bus stop I was at when I was reading through them.

I would also sometimes wander into the PSU bookstore and pick up text books that looked interesting. That probably comes from really wanting to keep my Psychology 101 textbook but needing the money that came from selling it back, but they were mostly history.

Part of that was imagining that I would someday be writing lots of historical material, and these would be good resources. If there was an interesting tidbit of information and you let it go, who knew if you would ever be able to find it again?

Enter the internet.

There is one book that I have just because it mentions Justa Grata Honoria's overture to Attila the Hun, but I don't need to look in the book to find it now.

I don't completely regret that. Many of my comfort reading books came from those book buying binges. 

I do still prefer libraries now. There are different needs for different times.

They say that to encourage reading in children, a child should get about ten new books to own per year. 

Now, they also encourage that you read 1000 books to your child before kindergarten. A different book daily for three years gets you there, and it's five years until kindergarten; it's doable. You don't want to have to buy or store all of those books, but yes, there should be some that stick around, and that should be continuing long past kindergarten.

We had a lot of books in our house when I was growing up. Some of them I devoured, some things I read too early, and some of them were boring and or not that great in other ways. There is a very out of date junior encyclopedia that I hang on to because I have such an attachment to it from flipping through it over and over again.

My point is that there is room for a lot of variety. That's not just between different people, but also between different stages of life, and the combinations one has living with different people at different times.

For the most part, I do not regret books I have bought. I do regret under-utilizing libraries at different times, when I just wasn't getting there or when I was stubborn about using the request system. 

Access to books is vitally important for me; it doesn't always require ownership.

I have gotten into a pattern that works for me, and I love that.