An article by Holly Stark, North Lincolnshire writer and MA Creative Writing graduate, University of Hull.
My Auntie Valri once wrote to me in a letter that reading books and collecting books are two different hobbies. It couldn’t be more true.
Books seem to migrate on their own.
“They do, they have souls,” wrote Zoe from Inkfish Writers Group after a conversation about unread piles and overflowing shelves turned unexpectedly philosophical.
Books move strangely through human lives. They appear in cardboard boxes during house moves. They gather beside beds during heartbreaks. They arrive through postboxes after moments of existential collapse. They stack themselves in kitchens, bathrooms, backpacks, charity shops, student flats, library sales and tiny independent bookshops tucked between cafés and pubs.
I have lived in many houses, but books have always arrived before I properly did.
There are books I have carried across counties and countries without ever opening. Books bought because of a title alone. Books inherited. Books rescued from boxes left out in the rain. Books abandoned in laundrettes and train stations. Some are companions. Some are invitations. Some feel sacred.
The unread pile beside the bed tells a different story from the culture of productivity surrounding us.
Not failure. Desire.
A map of intellectual and emotional becoming.
I think collecting books is less about possession and more about world-building. To surround yourself with books is to construct a living ecology of possible thought. A second-hand copy of Rebecca presses against a Northern birdwatching memoir. A damp poetry collection rescued from a charity shop leans beside climate theory and a cookbook stained with olive oil. Every shelf becomes a microcosm of different worlds.
The books begin speaking to one another long before you read them.
Independent bookshops understand this instinct better than algorithms ever will. To enter a good bookshop is not simply to shop. It is to wander through an ecosystem of human curiosity. Recommendation algorithms flatten literature into consumer behaviour, but real reading culture has always been communal, accidental and deeply embodied. Marginalia from strangers. Books lent out and never returned. Reading groups drifting from novels into confessions about grief, class, climate anxiety, loneliness or love.
Across Hull and the Humber region, literary culture survives through quiet acts of participation. Part of that culture lives in bookshops. Places where browsing still feels slower than scrolling. In Hull, spaces such as Little Wren Books and independent second-hand bookshops continue creating opportunities for accidental discovery: the novel you weren’t looking for, the essay collection that arrives at exactly the right moment, the conversation that begins over a recommendation from a stranger.
It lives in libraries and cafés, in workshops and open mic nights, in dog-eared notebooks carried across the city. It lives in the conversations that happen before and after events. It lives in people turning up on rainy evenings because they want to think slowly together.
When I studied for my MA in Creative Writing at the University of Hull, I discovered just how many literary ecosystems exist beneath the surface of the city. Organisations such as Humber Mouth, local writing groups, libraries, festivals and grassroots arts communities continue creating spaces where stories can be shared outside the logic of algorithms and productivity.
What strikes me most is how many of these communities emerge not from institutions but from collective need. People gathering because they are curious. Because they are lonely. Because they are grieving. Because they are searching for meaning. Because they want to make things alongside other people.
Books become bridges in these spaces. A novel passed across a café table. A poem scribbled into a notebook during a workshop. Someone reading their work aloud for the first time and discovering their voice carries further than they imagined.
Entire communities have formed through shared sentences.
Perhaps this is what the ecology of books really is. Not simply paper and ink, but relationships. Human ecosystems formed around stories.
Books create ecosystems because readers do too.
Living beside the Humber Estuary, I often think about movement when I think about books. Tides, migration, drift. Stories move through communities in much the same way. A recommendation passed between friends. A memoir borrowed and returned years later. A novel found in a charity shop that somehow arrives exactly when it is needed.
I have carried books across rented houses, between cities and over borders. Books became anchors against homesickness and cold winters. Books balanced on windowsills beside bowls of tomatoes and garlic.
Books remained necessary objects. Not luxuries exactly, but emotional infrastructure.
Perhaps this is why unread books comfort me so deeply. They resist the speed of contemporary life. They wait patiently in a culture oriented toward optimisation. An unread book is hopeful by nature. It says there will be another winter. Another train journey. Another version of yourself.
At night, when the house is quiet, I like the comfort of knowing they are there.
Hundreds of small paper worlds breathing softly beside one another.
Little ecosystems of thought and memory.
Microcosms of different worlds held together on shelves built from trees.