Several years ago I decided to get rid of the vast majority of our bookshelves. My dreams of having a personal library complete with a ladder that moved round the shelves were clearly never going to be realised and I was tired of my tiny flat being stuffed with rows and rows of books that collected dust. And so the great clear out began. Five huge shelves would be replaced with one shiny new one which would have space for 50 tomes max – everything else had to go.

As a person who treasures books and defines their life by them it was no mean feat. But, as depressing as it was, I didn’t want to be bogged down with novels I would never read again, even more so the ones that I had never completed or even got past the first par with.

Bouyed by an interview I did with Nick Hornby I clung to what he told me: “If a book is killing you, for God’s sake put it down.”

I promised Mr Hornby that I would get rid of one such book that very weekend. And so the dog-eared copy of the Lord of the Rings that had stared out accusingly at me in every house I had lived in for more than 20 years was first in the charity box, complete with the bookmark I had left somewhere about two thirds of the way through. I was free. No longer the person who had spectacularly failed to finish it in two decades but now a person who just didn’t enjoy it that much.

That, however, was the only one I felt joyful about.

The duplicates were not too hard. As fellow journalists my husband and me had several of the same titles – mine were in better condition so it was largely mine that stayed. As it wasn’t my books that were going that was a good section to get in the swing with.

Then came the old novels that hadn’t had that much impact on my life. The funny gift books went. The collections that showed my temporary fascination with one particular subject were significantly thinned; the factual and fiction books on the Mafia that sat next to dozens of books on Buddhism were pared down to a few titles (though the Buddhism books fared significantly better, you’ll be pleased to hear).

A few of those that the whole world has raved about were next – yep, it is true that my copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and One Day were picked up and put down more times than I care to remember. I failed where a million others had succeeded. But I let the guilt go. Hell, I have never been a follower whether it was about politics, ra-ra skirts, or cult films, indeed I brazenly declared decades ago that I found all-bar-one Shakespeare tale turgid so why was I holding on to all these books that people told me I must enjoy? Someone else undoubtedly would, and they’d get them for the bargain price of 50 pence.

Really old books that had been bought from dusty second-hand bookshops as souvenirs of lovely days out were toughies. I was pained by the thought that they might never be loved again. An Oscar Wilde and a book about Cary Grant with a brilliant intro stayed, the others went.

And though I have on occasion mourned its loss, a prized Roald Dahl was given to a little girl I love, one whose mother I had repeatedly read the long-lost original copy with. It has since been replaced by more of the wondercrump’s witterings which made me laugh when I couldn’t focus on ‘real’ books.

In amongst the madness was the decision to keep all three copies of a Jay McInerney book that is considered to be my favourite because of its place in my reading history – each one is precious in its own way, though none is the original that I lent out and never got back.

By the end of a process that took many weeks of sorting and re-sorting we were left with one uber-tidy shelf of our very finest. Well, apart from the suitcase on top of the wardrobe and the box under the bed of ones we haven’t quite parted with yet.

And now, several years down the line, that bookcase that originally looked like something from the pages of a stylish magazine has novels laying awkwardly on top of the carefully aligned titles, big piles of books hidden behind the neat rows, and even a few balanced next to the ornaments that were chosen to break up the display.

One day, one day, I will sort them out again and pare it all back to those titles that I really treasure but for now I have to admit, I’m a bookish kinda girl.

* Hang fire for blogs about some of my favourite titles and what they mean to me.