The books I find at my disposal from month-to-month are determined by two factors: how often I am able to get down to the public library and what kind of mental headspace I’m in at the time. I have always been the kind of member who pushes to excess the boundaries of library privileges. The only time my card has been at zero discharges was the day I first claimed it. There’s not many things I find as genuinely and simply pleasurable as walking between shelves, pulling book after book down and somehow struggling with the stack to the checkout desk (usually after pulling a muscle in my back, or one of my family members gets bored and wants to leave).

I’d noticed my compulsivity for these temporary acquisitions by an early age. I think it was because I grew up in a small country town. Our library resources were slim, to say the least, so if you were lucky enough to spot a title you wanted you made damn sure to grab it before anyone else did; however, my actual reading habits have been curtailed as an adult. I might borrow a great many books, and begin these, but I’m finishing less and less of them. I worry that by getting ‘grabbier’ I’m becoming less discerning. Still, it makes for an amusing anecdotal aside. Like when I think to myself how I must try Junot Diaz’s work and, lo, there on the shelf is This Is How you Lose Her. But after three stories, I put it down. On a huge pile at my feet, I can pick out four cookbooks, Lily Brett’s Lola Bensky, Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me, Susan Johnson’s My Hundred Lovers, Romy Ash’s Floundering, a travel book, one on social media marketing, one on interior design, another on sustainable living, David Foster Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not and Chuck Palanuik’s Damned. Quite an assortment. Will I get to them before they need returning? Here’s hoping.