The books I ordered from Britain for Christmas have finally arrived on the doorstep.

This was distressing not just because my husband didn't get his Tottenham Hotspur football calendar under the tree but because Amazon.co.uk had already apologized and refunded my money for the 12 books.

I had figured they would show up eventually but finally broke down and re-ordered them. The second package, efficiently delivered by the German post office (an odd choice), arrived within four days.

So now I have not 12 books but 24 twins. Since the rule of the house, bursting with books already, is that every arriving book must be matched by one thrown out, I have a difficult task ahead.

I hate discarding books, particularly since the garbage police say they must be torn apart to be recycled.

Uncivilized

It seems uncivilized to destroy the printed word. I feel like that peculiar Toronto man who's trying to have Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale banned from his son's Grade 12 English class.

He says Atwood's most famous book is "fictional drivel" as well as brutal, sexist, sexual and depressing, the local paper reports. But all he has achieved is to embarrass his son even more than parents usually do with their high-waisted pants and by loudly asking the waiter where the toilet is.

My problem with books is not moral but mathematical.

I have too many for my small home and were I not so tidy I would worry about turning into one of those hoarders who ends up crushed by the tottering piles of literature they accumulated in their fire-hazard dwellings.

I think I have about 6,000 in all, an estimate made with a calculator for books per metre and by adding up the shelving while making adjustments for paperbacks and hardcovers.

I know it sounds absurd but words are my love, my heroin, my blood, the only things I would purchase without counting the cost.

Content matters

In my case, the passion isn't bibliomania with its obsession with first editions and autographs. It's the contents that matter, not the party clothes they're dressed in.

Politics, biography (better than any pharmaceutical), cookbooks and food memoirs are on the main floor; reference texts on the landing; humour and travel in one spare room; art books in another; essays, poetry and all fiction, including an entire collection of Ruth Rendells, in my office.

In the basement, we have history and whatever I consider second rate at the moment.

When my stepchildren were young, we used to play The Book Game. I'd point out a shelf and the other player would call out the book I had selected in my mind. Is it A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace? "No."

Is it Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive by Emily Colas? "Warmer."

Is it Scotty Bowman: A Life in Hockey by Douglas Hunter? "Yes! My turn!"

I know we sound like deprived people without Monopoly or even Twister in the house. But we were happy in our humble way, like a baby given wooden European educational toys but who would rather play with a jam jar lid.

The first stick

What I'm waiting for is a Canadian version of the Kindle, Amazon's e-book reader, or the Sony Reader.

Early adopters are mad, flinging away money on primitive versions of great inventions. Who was the first Neanderthal inventor of the Stick, for instance, created to scratch words in the sand? He must be kicking himself now.

The e-book reader I buy will have switchable colours rather than the silver of the Kindle. It must be instantly scannable and permanently markable.

When I read a passage that I think is startling, I want to draw a line in the margin. An idiocy gets a ?, anything astonishing or funny gets a !. Without this code, the best sentences might be lost forever.

Every collector has his thing. Rosie O'Donnell collects Happy Meal toys, which once elicited a look of frozen horror from her talk-show guest Steve Martin: he collects painters, Hockneys and Hoppers, although he does exhibit them in Las Vegas.

Some people collect beer steins and dolls, even Pokemons and Supersoakers. Stephen Calloway, author of Obsessions (I have the book), says collectors are the modern hunter-gatherer. Only humans want to possess things.

A modest obsession

Calloway tracks down people who collect insects, cookie jars, rocking horses, samurai armour, packaging, Russian icons, mannequins, handsaws, slot machines and hotel room keys.

It can get worse: swimming caps, bobbins, trivets, knives (Bowie, trench, dirks and daggers), typewriters, phone cards, fishing lures and so on.

Worst of all, most collectors form clubs. Imagine their small talk. Can talk get smaller?

The psychiatric explanation for collectors is anxiety — they tell themselves that however confused the world is, they will always have their Victorian china butter pats — or childhood, when many things were taken away and will now be restored.

Alan Powers' book, Living with Books (yes, I own it, too), discusses stacking, shelving, organizing by height and colour, new places for storage, building bookcases out of books, which I have done, and employing books as sound-deadeners and insulation. It also deals with the weird French habit of publishing books in white covers.

I'm not a collector, the reason being that I buy books to read and re-read, not to sit on the shelves undusted and alone. Which brings us to the 24 books that will have to go.

The first 12 duplicates will go to friends. The recipient of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the 14th Century by Ian Mortimer will have to be a patient, long-suffering friend obviously.

Here's the other 12, all in the basement: fiction by the banal Hemingway, the breathy Jane Urquhart, and the dull A.S. Byatt. Also, the overrated sex-with-dad Anais Nin and that worthy Mavis Gallant.

I will likely also toss out Dan Jenkins' football novels (out of date). Some bad emotional spillage: Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation) and Anne Enright (worst-ever Booker winner). Advice books: Insure Sensibly and Basic Home Wiring Illustrated. Coffee table books: In My Room, which is a look at teenager's bedrooms, and Unmentionables: A Brief History of Underwear.

Bad books, easily destroyed.

But the irate Toronto father should know that I have two copies of The Handmaid's Tale, in hardcover and paperback.

Imagine being away from home and not having Atwood. Or Jonathan Franzen or Barbara Vine or Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, Virginia Woolf, Larry McMurtry, Anne Tyler, Douglas Coupland, Adam Gopnik, Alan Coren, Witold Rybczynski, Gabor Maté, Alexandra Fuller, Stephen Fry, Emile Zola, Vikram Seth, Scott Turow.

What would I do without these writers? How would I survive without their books lining my walls