The Late Fee is a Punch in the Face

No!

My bedroom is like a library. It really is starting to worry me about whether one morning I'll be woken by a fragrant old dear looking for the next Catherine Cookson. Because books and DVDs are ideal given for a media junkie whore like myself, I tend to acquire a lot. Then I have to find somewhere to put them while I work through the backlog.

There's a special shelf on one of my bookcases where all the "To Be Read" books are kept, neatly separated into fiction and non-fiction and then by author. However, there are so many crammed in that it's getting hard to work out not only where to put the next one on the pile but also what the next one out should be. Those tall books that don't fit are squeezed in elsewhere, and there's even overspill to my bedside table, where unread copies of Empire and Sight & Sound join, for some reason, three issues of the Beano, a Walkman, a pair of sunglasses and an alarm clock with no batteries.

This region, which I have started referring to as "Basingstoke", does supply a vital function. It acts as the home for my toilet books. If ever I need to make an extended visit, or pick something up to read in bed while my brain goes into standby mode, that is where I reach. Having torn through the magazines, I'm left with the comics - which I'm saving for the next time I take the tube to work in my suit - and Running Through Corridors.

...and available through this very link

This fine tome, which I cannot recommend too highly, is the first part of a three-volume saga in which Robert Shearman - award-winning author, playwright and Doctor Who scriptwriter - and his chum Toby Hadoke - actor, comedian and originator of award-winning one-man show Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf - watch the revered sci-fi series in its entirety in the course of a single year, a Sisyphean task which entails watching two episodes a day before sharing their thoughts via email, with these correspondences forming the text. It's a revelation, forcing the seasoned fan to rethink their attitudes and acting as a helpful accompaniment to a Not-We seeing the episodes for the first time. Superb.

The books I'm actually reading stay on the special shelf until they are needed, leaving a space when they venture out. At the moment I'm stumbling through Dickens's Barnaby Rudge - a historical novel even when it was written - and the first volume of J.G. Ballard's collected short stories. Fascinating, both. The rest of the shelf has a schizophrenic selection of books, including birthday and Christmas gifts stretching back almost 18 months, miraculous rare finds from Notting Hill and the pickings of a friend's pre-move clearout. Kurt Wallander and James Bond have three representatives each, while a shop-soiled copy of Olaf Stapledon's epochal Star Maker sits next to a mint condition novelisation of Dawn of the Dead, found for a pittance on the Charing Cross Road. There's even a manual for bicycle maintenance, which I really ought to look at rather than go to the Man to have my inner tube replaced, as I did at the weekend - I had run over a 5mm long piece of wire.

"You couldn't film it. You couldn't lift it." - Kubrick's producer,
remembering when the first draft of Lolita was handed in.

The stuff that won't fit on the special shelf is even more intimidating. Two unread Doctor Who annuals - What? I like to do the wordsearches - are but nought compared to the Stanley Kubrick Archives. A 300-page hardback colossus seemingly bound in concrete and lead, I used to keep it in my bed, since the sheer effort in supporting it and turning the pages during 10 minutes' read was enough to put me spark out. It now sits at the bottom of another set of shelves, sharing space with my Christmas Radio Timeses.

Although I don't for a moment regret joining my book group and the resulting enhancement of my social life, the plurality of print infesting the corners of my room do make me wonder sometimes whether or not I'd be able to bluff my way through the meetings, never reading the book at all and instead frenziedly devouring, say, Greg Bear's Eon, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made or The Timewaster Diaries in a desperate bid to clear some damn space.