This week I have had 23 boxes delivered from a storage space in Prague. Twenty of those boxes were full of books that I collected throughout my life up until the point of my move to the US four years ago where I started a new “collection”.

I have twelve more boxes to unpack and neatly organise on my generous bookshelves, what a feast! I am finding duplicates (what is it about Flannery O’Connor that makes me want to own multiple copies of her work?), despite my diligent updating of a list of books that I own, and I managed to find a home for one of a double with my next door neighbour. Which edition of Wendy Cope’s Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis do I keep? The one with Faber and Faber’s “f”-design, or the sleeker bright red one? I opted for the “f”s as I think the sleek red one will catch somebody’s eye quicker…

I am finding books that I do not remember buying (they must have been a gift, then?) and there are some that only now make sense. Such as,  Classic Poetry - An Illustrated Collection that is aimed at children and that I plan to give my 11-year-old niece who loves poetry and whom I did not know back when I came across the book.

What do I do with the duplicates in different languages? I now have Turgenev in Czech and English; and what do I do with Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow in Czech since I read it in English while in the US and gave away that copy as I did not enjoy the book? Any takers? I will mail it for free.

Should I give Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip another go as it is one of very very few books I did not finish? And what will I do with all the Irish Bildungsromans that I acquired back during my aborted PhD studies?

It all also means that I can finally read the books I got excited about, bought years ago and then could not read them until now, such as Eimer McBride’s A Girls is a Half-Formed Thing or Mártín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust.

And then there are authors you portion yourself as they have passed and you want to make sure you stretch them out for as long as you can… I am talking about John McGahern, Elizabeth Bowen or William Trevor, amongst others.

The sweet reunion with ‘the bible’ of English language studies at Charles University in Prague – Mluvnice současné angličtiny na pozadí češtiny by Libuše Dušková et al. The source of laughter when you realise the intended puns in the examples of various grammatical rules.

The sweet smell of an ancient collection of William Falkner’s works discovered in a second-hand book shop in my hometown in Slovakia and the pages crumbling under the touch.

This text is as disjointed as are the contents of my boxes. It is an verbal illustration of the rich mixture of feelings and thoughts the unpacking is causing me to experience. These are the books I lugged from my biannual trips to the UK that started 16 years ago. These are the fruits of my endless prowling of the charity and second-hand shops. These are the proofs of my love affair, obsession, addiction, call-it-what-you-like with books and words.