I have acquired repetitive strain injury, namely, a crick in my neck from watching television at an uncomfortable angle.
I blame it on Zoom, our newest courtesy-of-Covid form of communication, where almost every interview or group discussion is conducted remotely via a homescreen.
In order to appear serious, cultured and/or intellectually superior, many participants choose to position themselves in front of their well-stocked and carefully curated bookshelves.
This is counterproductive for me, the viewer, since I’m sitting with my head at 90 degrees trying to decipher the titles on the spines of their books in order to ascertain their taste in literature and, consequently, whether or not they're worth listening to.
Their book titles are often difficult to discern since the interviewees' Zoom lighting is frequently amateurishly wrong, their faces a funny colour and all nose. It's hugely distracting and frustrating.
'Bookcase envy' is the newest form of snobbery - a blatant exercise in one-upmanship for the intelligentsia, a style statement for the deeply shallow.
No more a random storage solution for the rest of us who just love to own and read books. Fashion has laid its fell hand upon book display. 'Why not catalogue your collection by jacket colour?' they suggest. 'Why not arrange them by size to create an undulating vertical graph effect? Or architecturally, in alternating vertical and horizontal groups?'
'A low ottoman or coffee table between two sofas will draw attention to your collection of larger art, sculpture of fashion volumes (great slabs of things, rarely opened) displayed pyramid style.'
There’s nothing more pretentious than a set of elaborately bound 'classics', bought by the yard and never read. As someone once witheringly observed, "Books do furnish a room".
I belong to a book group that, pre-Covid, engaged in lively debate over each month's title. I confess to my shame that once, by dint of listening attentively and offering my critique last, I managed to fool them into thinking I'd actually read it. They never found out. Until now
Personally, I favour the squidged-in-wherever-they'll-fit system. I like Professor Mary Beard's bookshelves whose display is as chaotically assembled as she is.
I dread the 'must read' recommendations of book bullies in the guise of enthusiastically evangelical acquaintances who badger you into reading books they adored. They subsequently check by asking pointed questions to prove that you have.
I belong to a book group that, pre-Covid, engaged in lively debate over each month's title. I confess to my shame that once, by dint of listening attentively and offering my critique last, I managed to fool them into thinking I'd actually read it. They never found out. Until now.
Once I was invited onto a local library's Booker Prize panel. Our task: to read all six of the Booker shortlist titles and discuss their merits. It was not a vintage Booker year and the scrupulous preparation was rigorous. The winner was, in my opinion, a book that killed time - for those who liked it better dead.
We all wish to be intellectually well thought of. Visitors invariably cast a sly eye over your bookshelves and privately pass judgment on your reading taste. I just hope nobody discovers my entire oeuvre of Regency romances by Georgette Heyer hidden in the attic, or I'll be condemned as a complete airhead.
My books are old and valued friends, collected over years. Though the chances of my re-reading many of them are unlikely, I hate giving them away - and as for lending them to people who neglect to return them, forget it.
I can't be doing with those Kindle thingamajigs. It's the smell and the feel of a book I enjoy and the fact that you can find your place with a page number.
The act of turning pages is a satisfying sense of achievement and progress in itself. A book is an excursion ticket to new cultures, history, myth, mystery and adventure, other people's lives and loves.
To open the door of a book and lose oneself travelling through it with its characters is a panacea for all life's ills. Reading is one of the few unspoilt pleasures left - perfect escapist therapy in these uncertain times and the ideal antidote to sleeplessness when your biological clock's gone haywire, you're wide awake as a box of birds at three in the morning and tempted to creep to the kitchen to make toast...
