Too many books

I went shopping yesterday, which turned out to be arguably a bad move since I ended up spending almost £30 on books, none of which I had intended to buy. Damn WHSmith for their "2 for £10" deal, and damn Ottakars and their "3 for 2" deal! However, I did manage to buy mostly books that were already on my wishlist, so I don't feel too guilty.

Those of you who recommended books to me earlier this week will be pleased to know that I bought Inversions (Iain M. Banks), The Crow Road (Iain Banks), Holes (Louis Sachar) and Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer), which I've been meaning to read for ages. I also got Animal Farm, which I was planning to read online, forgot to take off my potential holiday list and was therefore considering printing it out since it's received a lot of votes and so I have to take it on holiday.

After having purchased the above five books, my friend directed me towards the door of Ottakars to prevent me from seeing any others worthy of buying, but, alas, right next to the door was a stand of discounted copies of Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About by Mil Millington. Having been a reader of Mil's web page (entitled "Things my girlfriend and I have argued about") for a good six months now - and if you haven't read it, I urge to you do so now (or, at least, after you've finished reading this) - of course I had to buy it.

The good news is that this left me with no money to buy any discounted videos or DVDs, which seems to be another weakness of mine. But I am approaching a critical point with regards to the rapidly decreasing amount of space in my bedroom, because where once there was a large volume of air there is now a large volume of books. I've filled up my shelves, I have double rows of books on my bookcase, more books piled on top of the books on the shelves, the top bed of my bunkbed has dumped on it all the books I've read since January, and all the books I've bought since December are in a large cardboard box in the corner. This is the pile of books that I've bought over the last eight months or so and not read yet (minus threeish, which I forgot about):

I seem to be buying books at a much faster rate than I can read them. Is the solution (a) buy fewer books, (b) try to increase my reading pace, or (c) just live with it and appreciate the fact that I won't run out of books for months?

I'd say (b), because firstly there's so many of them that I really want to read, and secondly my rate of reading books has slowed down dramatically since February when I passed my driving test and started driving to school rather than taking the coach, hence no reading on the coach, and fifty pages per day fewer than before. It's started to annoy me that, eg., it took me three or four weeks to read Dune and the same so far for The Once And Future King (although I was reading another book at the same time. One for each eye :) ). When I'm commuting to work next year I'll start ploughing through them again :)

And I'll stop posting about books sometime. I promise.