The Bookless Club: What do you collect, and why?

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Unlike the shot glass collection, my bears are in storage. I don’t dare bring them out lest the frequency illusion take hold again. Clearly, I’m susceptible.

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Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former National Post columnist who lives in Vancouver. She writes The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. For more of what Jane’s up to, check out her website, janemacdougall.com

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This week’s question for readers:

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Question: The Bookless Club: What do you collect, and why?

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Send your answers by email text, not an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at [email protected]. We will print some next week in this space.

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Last week’s question for readers:

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Question: What’s on your bucket reading list?

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• I’ve managed to read most of what Stephen King has written so far, but the ones that I have not read yet, despite having the box set on my shelf for years, is his Dark Tower series — eight books in total. Now that I am retired, I think I’ll finally force myself to get started on them.

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Rory Mulhern

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• My English Lit degree had me enjoy the pleasures of Brontë, Eliot and Dickens. I have tried to revisit them in retirement and find myself reading murder mysteries only under 1,000 Kobo pages.

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John Pringle

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• Ah yes, Ulysses… How many times: “This is the year”? Have never made it beyond chapter one. I have, however, read the final chapter three times.

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Percy Lloyd

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• The picture with your column could have been of my own fully-laden IKEA shelves. But I have read — or re-read — all of mine over the years. And the reference books have been consulted at one time or another. I’m trying to downsize, but new acquisitions keep filling any empty spaces. Then there are the e-books on my iPad. Many of these still to be read.

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Ian McCallum

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• My wife and I are voracious readers. Our library is massive — currently over 1.5 million books, and we have a fairly long list of books in our “holding” area. The only time we pay anything for a book is when it’s a day or two overdue at the Vancouver Public Library. Whenever we hear about a book we think we’re interested in or read a review about in The Vancouver Sun, we simply put it on hold at our library account and take it back if not read in whole or part.

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Lance Read and Sharon Cooper

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• Your column reminded me of the time I forced myself to read Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, as it is a classic and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It was an absolute slog to get through. I read page after page of excruciating detail about the whaling industry that I never want to encounter again. Now, I never force myself to finish a book that I don’t like. As for the classics, I have read a number of Jane Austen’s novels several times each, and would gladly read them again. If only I had the time.

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Kerri Fraser

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• Last week I went, as I often do, to the terrific used book store, Book Lovers, and for $1 picked up Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”, which, like “War And Peace” is one of those books everyone should read, but don’t. I got to page three and put it away in favour of an Iona Whishaw murder mystery set in that dangerous part of B.C., the West Kootenays.

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Rob McDiarmid

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• I don’t keep a bucket list. I keep a champagne list. It’s filled with feminist essayists from the 1930s to 1950s — Woolf, West, McCarthy, Parker, de Beauvoir, Hurston — women who quietly pioneered the advancement of female writers and thinkers. And while I’m aware of the Hawking Index, those stats don’t influence me. I read and purchase what calls to me, not what algorithms predict I’ll abandon.

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Debra Dolan

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• I loved your column on tsundoku. Did you know that having unread books around your home is good for your well-being? Those unread books “provide psychological comfort by serving as reminders of your ongoing curiosity, intellectual ambition and future opportunities.” (Psychology Today). That makes me feel much better about my unread collection.