I’m definitely not a materialistic person. I don’t have to have the latest and greatest stuff; it just has to get the job done. And I’m not a pack-rat; you won’t find my place full of useless old junk.

But I do have a serious weakness: books.

If you were shopping with me, knowing I’m a computer geek, you might think, “Oh no, he is going to drag me into Circuit City, or EBGames, or Best Buy.” But no, it is far more likely I’m going to drag you into Chapters or Barnes & Noble, and somewhere within those rows of coffee-scented bookshelves, you’ll lose me. (Hint: send the search party to the fantasy/sci-fi section first.)

I don’t know what it is about books. I just can’t resist their tempting allure. I covet them more than anything else, I think. And after I read them, unless they were particularly bad, I want to keep them and never part with them — even though I have to admit that I’ll probably never read that book again in my life. I tell myself, “I’ll keep that one in case someone wants to borrow it,” and secretly hope that no one will ever ask to borrow it — because what if they lose it or wreck it? Seeing old books on the shelf just makes me feel… at home.

When we moved down to Louisiana, people made fun of the fact that we had brought so many boxes of books with us. (Little do they know we gave away just as many before the move! It was excruciating.) If I ever have a big enough living-room, I just want one entire wall of it to be bookshelves. At least one wall. Maybe four. Maybe the door to the room could be like one of those moving bookshelves where you pull a secret book and it opens… yeaaah!

What is so strange to me is that I keep being so tempted to buy new books, even though I am so very far behind on reading what I’ve already bought. My “Really Want To Read First” pile right this moment has at least 10 books on it, and most of those books are just the first in a trilogy or series. Something new always gets pushed on top of the pile, and it just keeps growing. By all rights, I should be barred from entering a book store or library for several years, so I can get done reading the things I already have.

Even with this odd book addiction, I haven’t been getting as much reading done the last several years; I haven’t had to commute to work, and that takes away a lot of reading time right there. I don’t think it’s necessarily that I’m reading a lot less — it’s just that I’m reading books less. More often than not, when I do get time to sit down with a coffee, I end up reading the latest news on the Internet, e-mail, or a magazine… I guess it’s just the small bite-sized and easily-interrupted nature of that kind of reading that has been appealing of late.

…but I still can’t resist the book store, nor resist the urge to buy more books.