Weekly Geeks #14 - Bookish Photos

This week's challenge is to provide "bookish photos" from around home. Suggestions include the TBR, favourite places to read and shelves of books. Those are the topics I'm going to go with.

So the obvious starter for ten: my TBR. It's a bookcase in our bedroom upstairs (while the main book collection is down in the rumpus room, so having a shelf upstairs in a necessity.)


Yes, the actual TBR is small. But that is both deceiving and deliberate. I read about 50/50 paper books and ebooks these days and there as as many books again (in fact, probably more) on my PDA that count as part of the TBR. Also, if the shelf gets too full, I get stressed by the number of books I want to read when I have limited energy and concentration for reading them, so I deliberately keep the number of books on it controlled. If something has been there too long or my enthusiasm for it has waned, I swap it out and take it back downstairs. I can always bring it up again later. Of the three books on the lower shelf marked as ready to go downstairs, two have been read and the other is one I know is a bit too complicated for my CFS-fogged brain at present, so I'm going to send it back downstairs until I feel more ready for it.


Here's my PDA (it's a Palm TX for anyone interested) that I use to read ebooks. I love it. I find reading on it easy and I love being able to control the font size and having something nice and light to hold. I don't know if it's my health issues or just the fact I'm getting older, but I struggle with books with tight packed, small fonts these days and much prefer to read them on the PDA. Also, books for it are much cheaper for me here in New Zealand as I don't have to pay the mark-ups due to shipping and exchange rates that paper books have in the shops here. And I don't have to wait. I just pay the US price, click "download" and I have my book ready to read. I just wish more books were available as ebooks as it's very frustrating when I find something I want to read and it isn't available. I prefer the PDA to a dedicated ereader device as I can use it for lots of other things too, such as an address book, a calendar, for podcasts and audiobooks and even to surf the web if I have access to a wireless network.


While I listen to my Audible audiobooks on the Palm, I find it less convenient for mp3 audiobooks, so here's my trusty mp3 player that I use for the others. It's not a hugely posh one, but it is perfect for me and I love the fact that it includes an FM radio so I have that option too when I'm awake in the middle of the night.

So where do I like to read? Well, the short answer is: everywhere. I'm one of those people who takes a book everywhere - I'll only ever buy a handbag if it is big enough to fit at least a paperback book. (Another advantage of the PDA is that it fits easily in my bag, no matter the length of the book I'm reading.) But I do have favourite (or at least frequent) places around home that I read.


Like many people, I like to read in bed. With my CFS, I spend a lot of time in bed and, so long as I'm actually awake (which is a lot less than I would like), naturally then, it is somewhere I tend to do a lot of reading. My bed is my friend.


While I'm happy to read in a chair or on the sofa, I actually spend a lot of my reading time on the floor, either sitting cross-legged or lying on my stomach with the book in front of me. With it being winter, that means the carpet beside the heater is currently prime real estate and I have to negotiate with the cat for the best spot.


Okay, I admit it. I read in the bathroom. Both the actual toilet (a seperate room in our house) and the bathroom itself. I have a four year old, and while he's old enough to play in the bath himself, he's not quite old enough for us to be happy to leave him to it on his own. So we have a bath ritual each night, where Marcus gets to play while I sit with him and read a chapter or two. After that, we get down to the serious business of washing. I do have to choose my books carefully for this as there tends to be quite a bit of water splashing. Again the PDA is good, as I just have to wipe the screen, but otherwise I pick something that I'm willing to let get some water spots on it. Generally that means no hardbacks, absolutely nothing that doesn't belong to me and nothing that I consider to be an especially precious book. Ratty old paperbacks are perfect.

As always, this post has got long and I still have the photos I took in our "library" down in the rumpus/spare room. So I'll just add some notes to the photos and make them the rest of this post. Like many bibliophiles, we have way, way too many books and never enough space for them all. The rumpus room is great as there's enough wall space to take most of our fiction collection, but there are still ten to a dozen boxes of books in the storage space under the house (along with moisture absorbers to protect them). While I love being able to look at all my books on the shelves, space is a premium and I hate to think how much more space I'd need if the 130 or so ebooks I have sitting on my laptop needed to be on shelves. So chalk up another point for ebooks. I'm happily a fence-sitter on the paper book/ebook issue - I love them both and think both have advantages and disadvantages. Generally, I buy my "keeper" books in paper and most anything else I'll get as an ebook if it is available.





There are a few other bookcases scattered around the house with things like coffee table books, craft books and cook books, as well as all Marcus' books in his room. But this is the bulk of our book collection.

I hope you enjoyed the quick book tour around our house.