Shelf life: novelist Hanya Yanagihara on living with 12,000 books (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Shelf life: novelist Hanya Yanagihara on living with 12,000 books (2017)

theguardian.com

20 pointsBrajeshwar15 comments

“Anyone who arranges their books by colour doesn’t truly care what’s in the books,”

With 12,000 books maybe but with my 300 I know where each book is even if I sort by color.

I like the post of Neil Gaiman's library that I copied to here: https://jakeseliger.com/2009/09/07/bookshelves-offices-and-n.... I still have an (expanded) version of the shelves in that picture, but I've switched towards reading more long-form articles on the Kindle, and more Kindle books in general. Life is too short to pay extra money for book storage in apartments and to spend a lot of time physically managing and moving books.

I also read ebooks because life is too short. Ebooks are always with me in my phone and I can read them whenever I want, without planning to take a physical book with me. I read as ebooks all the latest paper books I received as presents and most of the ones I bought myself.

My apartment is too small. I'd _love_ to have a library with physical hardcover copies of my favourite books. But there's no way I can spare a wall only for books.

So, digital for me.

On the flipside, you can't pull an ebook off your shelf and give it to a visitor if you think they'd like it.

Sure, you can email them a file, or text them the book title, etc., but neither of those are as frictionless as handing someone a paperback.

The novelist might very well have 12,000 books (I have about 7,500), but the double sided bookshelf in the picture would need to be between 50 to 100 feet long in order to hold that many books.

I’m slightly disappointed. It’s a single (even if “wast” and double sided) book case. And even so it’s barely visible in the photo.

I think this one should give you a better view

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/22/hanya-yanagiha...

More picture https://i.pinimg.com/originals/29/b8/22/29b8221dc8167c6a8566...

“What books do you want to read over again?”

That’s a good Ask: HN question

Do people here reread books?

Very few. I think the only re-reads I've done is reading books to my kid.

Ian M. Banks' Culture series is the only notable exception. It's just that good.

Otherwise my stance on re-reading and re-watching is: there's too much _excellent_ content in the world to go through in a single lifetime, why spend time redoing something when you can experience something new?

For the same reason people. have favorite meals, favorite songs and favorite restaurants, I suppose.

The difference is, I think, that there is a limited number of foods in the world. You're bound to repeat and unless you're a billionaire, you won't have the time or money to cook a completely different meal every time for decades.

On the other hand, with under a hundred monetary units you can get every streaming service in existence and have years of content available.

For reference:

All of Star Trek alone is around ~850 hours of content. That's about 100 days if you watch 8 hours a day.

I did have time to watch it all once, when it came out at 45 minutes per week (except for Voyager, missed that). But how am I supposed to find time to rewatch 850 hours and still have a life?

Why would I do that when I could watch 425 movies I've never seen before instead?

On the other hand I do know some neurodivergent people who use TV-shows to relax, the fact of knowing what will happen in every episode is somehow comforting to them. My brain just goes "I could be experiencing something new instead of this".

Very rarely, but yes. Generally only fiction.

I have a specific category on Goodreads for reread books. Only a couple in that list, including The Stars My Destination and Manna. There's a handful that I might reread. The Player of Games currently tops that list.

Yep. Mostly scifi novels that I've enjoyed a great deal.

(This being HN, you can probably guess several of them quite easily.)

Yes, all the time. That's a way to understand how much I changed, like a mirror. Same with movies.

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