I don’t really own many books. A few years ago, driven by the idea of getting the maximum quality of life with the minimum number of possessions, I made certain choices. This doesn’t mean that I opted for the life of a monk; on the contrary, divesting yourself of many of your possessions gives you enormous freedom. Some of my friends (male and female) complain that, because they have so many clothes, they waste hours of their life trying to decide what to wear. Now that I have reduced my wardrobe to ‘basic black’, I no longer have this problem.

However, I’m not here to talk about fashion, but about books. To return to my main point, I decided to keep only four hundred books in my library, some because they have sentimental value, others because I’m always re-reading them. I took this decision for various reasons, and one of them was the sadness I felt at seeing how libraries, which have been painstakingly acquired over a lifetime, are often simply sold off as job lot once the collector is dead, with no respect shown for them at all. Also why keep all these books at home? To prove to my friends how cultivated I am? To decorate the walls? The books I have bought would be of far more use in a public library than in my house.

I used to say that I needed my books in case I ever wanted to look something up in them. Now, however, when I want to find out something, I turn on my computer, type in the key word or words, and everything I need to know appears on the screen –courtesy of the internet, the biggest library on the planet.

Of course, I still continue to buy books –there’s no electronic subtitute for them; but as soon as I’ve finished a book, I let it go; I give it to someone else, or the public library. My intention is not to save forests or to be generous. I simply believe that a book has its own journey to make, and should not be condemned to being stuck on a shelf.

Being a writer and living, as I do, on royalties, I might be working to my own detriment; after all, the more books that are bought, the more money I earn. However, that would be unfair on the reader, especially in countries where a large part of the government budget for buying books for libraries is clearly not based on two main criteria for making a serious choice –the pleasure one gets from reading a book, plus the quality of the writing.

Let’s leave our books free to travel, then, to be touched by other hands, and enjoyed by other eyes. As I’m writing this, I have a vague memory of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, which speaks of books that will never again be opened.

Where am I now? Sitting in a café in a small Pyrenean town in France, enjoying the air-conditioning, because the heat outside is unbearable. I happen to have Borges’ complete works in my house, which is a few kilometres from where I’m writing this –he’s one of those authors I constantly read and re-read. But why not put my theory to the test?

I cross the street and make the five minutes walk to another café, one that is equipped with computers (an establishment known by the nice, but contradictory, name of ‘cyber-café’). I greet the owner, order a glass of ice-cold mineral water, go to search engine, and key in some of the words of the line I do remember, along with the name of the author. In less than two minutes, I have the poem before me:

I felt exactly the same about many of the books I gave away: that I would simply never open them again, because new, interesting books are constantly being published, and I love to read. Now, I think it’s wonderful that people should have libraries; generally speaking, a child’s first contact with books arises out of their curiousity to find out about those bound volumes containing pictures and words; but I find it equally wonderful when, at a book-signing, a reader comes up yo me clutching a battered copy of one of my books that has been passed from friend to friend dozenz of times. This means that the book has travelled just as its author’s mind travelled when he was writing it.