In the open shelves next to my wardrobe the books pile up. On the top, those that are read and waiting to be returned to those who brought them. In the middle, the unread ones to be moved to the side locker where another pile are mentally marked ‘next.’

Used as I am to my house of books, they are merely comforting reminders of normal life, although I do get very twitchy when the ‘read’ towers soar above the ‘to be read.’

Visitors know to bring books for me to borrow, for in truth, there is nothing else I want or rather need.

For me to live in a room, without books, is to inhabit an uneasy sterile space that makes me almost ill with their lack.

Yet people do, so I don’t know why it surprises me still that nurses, doctors, other patients, enter my room and almost gasp at the evidence of my joy.

As do some visitors to my house. They say, with something approaching wonder: "Have you read all those?"

The bad part of me always wants to answer: "God, no. Why would I do that? Don’t be ridiculous."

But I don’t because I realise now that there are many who have never discovered, and never will, the thrill, the anticipation of opening a mint-fresh, page unturned, volume.

Many who will never walk into a library of leather clad works and raise their head to smell and inhale the rich, almost wanton odour of other minds crossing centuries.

Grow dizzy with the glory of all the dangerous thoughts and swooping ideas poured into print, waiting to delight and make us question our very being.

Will never know the lost hours profitably alone, happy with a book one reads slower and slower to delay its inevitable ending.

I feel a slight, very slight, shame in admitting I’m a book snob. Not in the sense that I believe literature has to be ‘great.’

I am, at times, as happy with a sun-oiled, so-called trashy novel as I am with the latest Murakami. It depends on my mood not my discernment. Any book which achieves the transcendence of one’s surroundings is a ‘good’ book.

No, a snob in the sense I judge people on their reading or rather lack of it.

On meeting new people I like, it is painful, actually painful and deeply disappointing, to be invited to their homes and search in vain for shelves of books.

How can I relate to those who have empty walls but enormous televisions? How can we probe our similarities or tease out the hidden soul without using the dance of books read or being read to see the intriguing swings of our moral compasses?

In one glancing sweep, our bookshelves reveal so much that is kept hidden from all but our closest – and even then.

Clothes, though increasingly less so, manners, arcane rules of etiquette, are all giveaway signs even to the unobservant, of society or one’s place in it.

But the books chosen go beyond the obvious; opening the ley lines of seeming conformity; showing the surprising byways taken when brain and written word sing, without knowledge beforehand, the same song of recognition.

Strangely, unlike most bibliophiles, I rarely seek out second hand bookshops.

I am uncomfortable in the intimacy of unknown readers’ books; can only liken it to the feel of a stuffed and mounted animal compared to the heat of a living, breathing one. Indeed, a paradox.

That came home to me strongly this week.

Miriam, now intimate with my book-lined house and the ones gathering here, returned from Emmaus, a well known charity shop beloved of both expat and French, with a pile of English books for me.

She speaks not one word of English, so had no idea what she’d bought. In fact she’d chosen perfectly. They were all thrillers, a genre I rarely buy but enjoy when given.

I read three and opened the fourth, a little more tattered but I could cope.

On the title page was a Christmas gift card. It read in blue biro: "Dear Dad, You know we love and miss you so much. Your loving daughters."

Two names and six kisses finished the brief message.

I couldn’t read the book. My mind drifted off as to how it had ended up in the charity shop after being so lovingly chosen by two girls far away in another country.

There is a sadness when books, as I see it, go missing.

When Miriam came next I told her about the message and said I wondered what had happened.

In that pragmatic French way she looked at me as if I weren’t as intelligent as she’d thought.

"Well, he’s dead, isn’t he?" she said. "That’s why all the English books are there. They’re given when they’ve died. No-one wants them."

But of course.

So I’m forced to think of my own library and its future. Will someone one day pick up a book and read a scrawled message inside and wonder what became of her?

I open another book. A new one. And go to a better place.