Welcome to the library. Part 1

If you have somehow stumbled upon my website and are now reading this blog post, congratulations you are awesome and may I say you have great taste in reading material. When it comes to collecting books, I do believe that there is a wrong and a right way to go about it. I have been collecting books since I was a kid but I did not hit my stride until a few years ago. Back in the day, I feel really old just saying that, I would beg my parents to buy me a book. Sometimes I would find them at a bookstore on base, other times through the book fair at school. Book fairs, ahh what a wonderful time.
I would buy them because I wanted to read them, an odd thought process I know, but it worked for me back then. I would buy the book, read the book, put said book on a shelf and start the process all over again. 
I even went back and reread a few of them when my parents weren't in the buying Nic new books mood. When I became a teenager, especially in my later teen years, I finally put all my books on one six foot tall shelf and I liked the way it looked. Seeing them all together really made me realise that I wanted to display my books like trophies, worlds that I had conquered. 
Over the next few years I eagerly read through everything I could get my hands on. I read fantasy and science fiction with a little YA sprinkled in there. I read as fast as I could and as soon as the books were closed, no matter what time it was, I had to add them to the shelf. Soon the shelf became overcrowded and a second shelf had to be purchased, then any surface in my room that could hold a book did so. 
This continued until I bought my first house and began construction on my office/library. It was at this point though that I discovered I had a problem. This is where the wrong way comes in to play. Buying books that I wanted to read, and reading them, was fine. I was able to exercise my mind and not completely destroy my wallet. It was about this time though that I discovered the wonders of online shopping. This was a very bad thing for me.
I began to order books that I wanted to read and had been looking for for years. I ordered hard copies of books that I had in paperback. I ordered books that were missing from collections. I ordered books that were by an author that I liked and had not read yet. All of this is well and dandy, except I did all of that and more in a very short time. All the while still buying books off Facebook, and in person at bookstores. My house looked like the Dursley house in Harry Potter when all the letters were being delivered. I was Harry, my wife was everyone else. 
I not only spent a lot of money extremely fast, I was also buying books faster than I could read them. Soon my TBR pile was over a hundred books and I was still online, clicking BID or Buy on the next find. 
​I will cover more about this and conclude this story in my next blog post. BYE!