Is there such a thing as too many books?

Image via Flickr (My Favorite Book Shop, originally uploaded by Lochaven)

The photo above is accompanied on its Flickr page, by a wonderfully apt Henry Ward Beecher quote: "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"

Having recently read this insightful piece by Toby Lichtig in The Guardian, 'Giving Up Book Shopping', I will hang my head in shame and admit I too have a problem...

I am so easily seduced in bookshops by the endless rows of unread books just waiting to have their spines cracked and their pages turned down, to have the new 'paper-and-glue' smell inhaled deeply.  I commoditise books - I read them too - but I love them a little too much as design objects, totems, possessions. I browse the bookish blogs and flick quickly back and forwards to my Amazon wishlist app (curse you, iPhone, for making it too easy to succumb), in search of the next wordy high.

I have rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves - I'd love an oak panelled study with library ladders, but that's another story - yet still nowhere to put the ever-inceasing piles of books I've bought and never read.

To that end, a little Spring cleaning - this is a list of unread books currently taking up space that I bought with the nest of intentions but, for one reason and another, have never got around to reading.  The rule is, no Amazon till they're gone to a good home ... so, help me out, please claim any you'd like and, providing you're in the UK, I'll endeavour to get them to you. Otherwise, the charity shop beckons. 

Oh, and swaps welcome if you're looking to clear some shelf space yourself.

And last ditch impassioned pleas to give a book a second chance ("you simply must read it, it's beautiful") also welcome.

Carson McCullers - The Ballad of Sad Cafe
DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little
AS Byatt - Babel Tower
EA Markham - At Home with Ms Vanesa
Haruki Murakami - After the Quake
Iain Banks - Espedair Street
Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved
JM Coetzee - Summertime
Ali Smith - Hotel World
Joyce Carol Oates - We Were The Mulvaneys
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Purple Hibiscus

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