do you actually "love books"? would you say to example for a stranger at a party "yeah, books, i love'em"? howabout someone you know?

I love books.

I love:

books
being aware of books
having books
buying books
looking at books
touching books
thinking about books

I like reading books but that pales in comparison to how much I love books themselves.

I’m with you, Silby. I also love coveting books- the fancy sort in nice editions and agonising whether to spend money on them, the anticipation of waiting for books to arrive, reading things other people have written in second hand books, badly mistreated books without front covers and scars down the spine, the deliberate choice of font in books, books that for some reason have a reversed spine making them stick out on shelves, books with uneven page sizes, book tokens for every birthday and Christmas, that funny feeling you get where near the end of the book where you realise that there is not enough time to give a satisfactory end, the all too rare total enjoyment of a book where you decide to abandon more pressing concerns, especially sleep, to finish it, reading the last line of books that you don’t intend to read, the way the biography section is like a collection of miniaturised people brains and memories on the shelf, tacky and ridiculous bookends you would never buy for yourself, for that matter using books as bookends, the furniture search where you are running out of book shelving and your books are in piles on the floor, the absolute bargains book gems to be found in poorly ran charity shops, book cover designs that are horrible and give rise to snap judgements that are later proved wrong, the old book swap shop I used to walk to and with completed books up to under my chin and the walk back with new, better books under my arms, the weird guilt I get while reading an unexpected sexy scene in a book in the company of others and you hope oh god don’t ask to read a bit and get the total wrong impression, and don’t even get me started on the greatest invention of all time the goddamn library. It’s all good.

keeping certain books near, whether I will ever read them again, or in some cases at all, has an invigorating, talismanic (some emph. on "manic") effect, or so I hope.

i love books too, as much as i love the rare surprise of a post like that one. xpost

The profoundest relationship of my life is between books and me.

In the dorm room at college, my teenage self and a couple of visitors had a look at the bookshelf. I made a sweeping remark about "the bond between a man and his books," and my girlfriend aggressively placed herself between me and the shelf.

She's long gone, but I have more books than ever.

i love books almost as much as i hate it when people gender their relationships with objects

I was raised by a librarian so