Newcastle University

Where do your books come from?

They vary. Primarily I buy them. I don’t really know how many books we have in the house, but primarily they’ve been bought, or bought secondhand, or inherited from family. I sometimes wonder about the library. I mean, I belong to the library here, which is something I always wanted to do once I knew about it when I moved up to the North East – I don’t know what it is about it, some silly romantic notion about the building, I think! But it is a very interesting place, and I’ve found being a member of it has opened up all sorts of different things that I might not have accessed otherwise. As a child, I was a regular user of the local library, I think that was something we did as a family. We went to the library every Saturday morning, and you got out a new book. So I was a regular reader in that sense. I’ve probably bought more and used the library less, which I sometimes feel quite guilty about, because I don’t want local libraries to close, but then I’m not using them, which is [laughs] – not to the extent I did. […] I did at one stage explore what the library had to offer online in terms of things you could access, like the British Library and things like that. I’d love to belong to the British Library, but I don’t think it’s realistic – I’m too far away!