Building more bookshelves.

The house, minus the odd finishing touch, is done – and what a change a month’s work has wrought! Tiled floors in place of vinyl, smooth cream walls in place of dirty "termite-finish" surfaces, and the glow of fresh paint and varnish all over. Nothing left to do but to move our stuff back in.

I’m particularly wound up about the fact that the new bookshelves are ready. Did I mention that I’m a book freak? Yes, precious, yes I am. Nette and I spent much of Sunday afternoon unpacking volumes and volumes of stuff from boxes we’d sealed off years before (when we thought we’d be moving to Singapore for good), and lovingly arranging our collection for display. At last count, we have a little less than 400 books, and we’re proud to say that none of them have that ghastly combination of words "sweet" and "dreams". (If you exclude the collector’s edition of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.)

One of the few joys I had in Singapore was the instant access to the best bookstores in the world (how a tight-assed culture could accommodate the world’s most freethinking books is beyond me) – Borders and Kinokuniya being just a ten-minute walk from each other on Orchard. If you paid me to waste my time in whichever way I saw fit, I’d earn mucho moolah by heading to Borders to have a go at the countless volumes stacked up on the shelves. I loved the fact that there was always something interesting around the corner shelf, and I can’t count the many "hhhh" moments I had on my almost-weekly visits.

Now that we’re safely (?) at home, Nette and I have time to consolidate the collection, sort them out, and decide what we’re going to give away. Happily, the latter makes for a pitifully small pile – mostly "bestsellers" we picked up from the odd secondhand bookstore to read on long trips. I’m sad to say that the sister-in-law’s copy of the Da Vinci Code will still have a place in the library; but who knows what a few more years might bring?

Did I mention that I’m really freaky about books? I mean obsessively-compulsively freaky. My Sony PDA has a list of all but the most recent books in our library, sorted by author, title, genre, date bought, ISBN, and rating. If you have a Palm-compatible PDA and a similar mania for books, I suggest you log onto Caustic Mango and download the free (for now) Pocket Library and its desktop equivalent. You’ll make your books happy. And you’ll take the first step on the long road towards certifiable insanity.

Not that I’m alone in my obsession. Apropos to the newly-redecorated house and its gleaming new shelves, Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite authors, has this to say: "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."