138+ Peacock Feathers

[littlerdog.livejournal.com]

The average British household has 138 volumes on its shelves, less [sic] than half of which have been read, according to research by storage company Shurgard. "It is a kind of peacock-feather display," says the writer and critic John Sutherland.

I think there's some truth in what he goes on to say--that the books in the bedroom are more likely to have been read. Just about all my books are in my bedroom or on the shelves just outside, handy for where I do most of my reading, ie in bed. But many of those are also unread, sad to say. So many books, so little time.... But honestly, by the time I got the peahen to the bedroom, surely the attraction would already have been decided? Eh.

As for Anthony Powell's Books Do Furnish a Room, it seems to have escaped the attention of the article's author that that title was a riposte to people who claimed the exact opposite....

For the record, I have read all the fiction by PKD on the shelves pictured. I have not yet read the books on the far right of the bottom shelf--they're mostly about PKD or the films made of his work and the two lying on top of the others are his bibliography. I think I've read just about everything on the top shelf, underneath the Family Hedgehog, but I'm not 100% sure.

ETA: Okay, I've gone and had a look at the actual top shelf rather than squinting at this low-light example of the photographer's art. There's two books at the far right I haven't read. One's The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, which hasn't been in the house very long, and the other is a book of PKD's short stories in Italian. I don't read Italian. I bought it for mad.

Apart from that, there's a couple of anthos there that I'm only halfway through--the Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 and the Best British Fantasy one, which turned out to be somewhat disappointing. All the rest have been read.