Bookguilt

How nice! Found a letter from MPH in my letterbox today telling me that I could collect RM33 of book vouchers - my rebate on the more than RM600 I've spent in the store in the last few months. RM600 out of the housekeeping money. (Shhhh ... don't tell my husband.) Bookguilt overwhelms me.

It's simply dreadful to have a decent bookshop this close to my house. To find my feet taking me there every time I'm bored, on the slightest pretext. ("I'm just going to 1 Utama to recycle my bottles.")

Bookgreed is my downfall. Cannot walk into a bookshop without coming out with a bagfull of books. Kinokuniya, Times, Popular, Silverfish (where Raman knows my weak spots) ... I'm a totally promiscuous bookbuyer and have all the members cards to prove it. KL's book emporiums are soon to include a franchise of Border's. (Raman informs me that book retail space in KL has grown from 20,000 square foot of retail space to 250,000 in the last five years ... are there enough readers to sustain this growth?) I haven't even mentioned Payless Books because I don't dare set foot inside the shop ... I know my weakness all too well. (I bought a dozen or so hardbacks donated by Payless to the Austrian/Swiss/German charity fair before Christmas anyway.)

And now sitting at the computer has become doubly dangerous because Amazon now has "one-click" ordering and any book you fancy is on it's way to you before you've even realised what your itchy-twitchy mouse-finger has done. (I hide the Amazon boxes in my car as a binging alchoholic hides the bottles.)

That RM600 spent at MPH is the thin end of the wedge, I'm telling you.

Then Abebooks is amazing. It's a database of second-hand bookshops around the globe. I used their services when I was trying to track down books by some of the authors coming to the Litfest last year. I got a brand-new hardback copy Ken Wiwa's In The Shadow of A Saint for just $12 Canadian from a university bookshop in British Columbia, and I managed to track down several of Paul Bailey's earlier novels (why on earth are they out of print? - another rant waiting to happen here!) for less than one pound sterling - interestingly enough, most of them seem to have been lifted at some point from libraries around Britain.

The next confession is a little more painful. I am not so much an avid reader as a squirreling bookhorder.

Might as well buy the book now while I see it, I think, because titles seems to just disappear from the shelves here when they are no longer flavour of the month. (Sadly I haven't quite developed the knack of finding my way to warehouse sales ...)

I accumulate books on my "To Be Read Shelf", where the titles are stacked two deep, with others wedged in on top of them. I tell myself I won't add to the stash until I've read at least some of them. And if I don't read them, I hope for some kind of osmosis to take place where book-knowledge transfers itself into my waiting brain while I am asleep. If only.

I shouldn't buy more books. My conscious mind can handle this fact. But then my resolve weakens when I get within sniffing distance of a bookshop and I have to have my fix.

(Jit Murad once compared reading to snuggling under his mother's armpit because both give the same sense of comfort and acceptance. Maybe this is the root cause of my bookaholism - a lack of maternal love ...)

Incidentally, the RM33 voucher goes towards the volume of Neruda's poems I actually managed to restrain myself (really!) from buying the other day.