Một tiểu luận về sách rất hay I am moving house. I am moving from the spacious flat I have lived in for 19 years, a corner house very bright and full of windows, a place of flights of stairs and landings and hallways, no room on the same level as another. A quirky flat that no-one but me wanted to buy in 1994, but an awful lot of it, from the yellow rose bush round the front door to the attic and eaves. There has always been space for more books; you could tuck in a few shelves in all kinds of places. I had them built when I moved here, by a carpenter called Crispin. It was his last job in London before he moved to Somerset and faded from my sight. ‘These aren’t going anywhere,’ he said, as he applied brackets to the wall that have made the bookcases difficult to remove. Over the years I have had to paint round them. But however many shelves Crispin built there were still never enough. The books in alphabetical rows were overgrown by piles of new books, doubled in front. Books multiplied, books swarmed, books, I sometimes dreamt, seemed to reproduce themselves – they were a papery population explosion. When they had exhausted the shelves, they started to take over the stairs; I had to vacuum round them. You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books. Many books are in my office; they are in a stand-off with technology as to which can take up more space, and aggravate and inconvenience me more. Who hasn’t crawled under the desk to disconnect a plug to attach some new gadget, and fused the reading lamp?
