I have a love-hate relationship with books. I love to read them. I hate to own them.

For much of my life, I have led a peripatetic existence, moving residences once, sometimes twice, a year. Some of the moves were down the block, some to different continents. They all required packing up my stuff and hauling it in and out of buildings, often involving multiple flights of stairs.

As a consequence, I try to keep my library to a minimum.

That might seem like a strange confession from someone who lives to read and write. Most bookworms and scribes fetishize their libraries, scouring bookstores for additions to carefully curated collections, obsessively organizing their bookshelves so that a prized first edition of Herzog can be easily located in the Macho sector of the Jewish-American Authors shelf, or A Confederacy of Dunces can be quickly found in the slim Posthumously Published Debut Authors section.

The dominant decor in the literary home is book-lined walls, broadcasting to visitors: Behold what a cultured garden I have made of my mind! Look at my prowess in the consumption of the written word! Gaze upon the astonishing breadth and depth of my intellectual capacities!

Writers are especially susceptible to this proprietary pride in the possession of publications. Just take a look at the website Stacked Up, whose pithy, no-nonsense slogan is “Writers show off their shelves.”

My husband and I normally have quite a harmonious relationship, but whenever we find ourselves at garage sales, second-hand book stalls, or those exotic, vanishing establishments called bookstores, we inevitably get into unseemly skirmishes. A Battle of the Books, if you will.

Your typical book lover, my husband thinks nothing of reaping armfuls of books, while I trail him, hissing, “Put that back! You can get that at the library! I’m pretty sure someone we know already has that one, so you can borrow it from them! That one’s going to break your back on our next move!” He rolls his eyes and plucks up yet another hardcover thousand-pager.

You might think, then, that I embraced the e-book revolution, which brought us the ability to load thousands of books into one sleek machine that puts no more stress on the book-holding muscles than a People magazine. You would be wrong. There is something sacrilegious to me about reading a novel by scrolling through pixilated words while bathed in the sickly glow of battery-fueled light. (Paradoxically, I have no trouble writing that way. I know, I’m a bundle of contradictions.)

It’s been five years since my family last moved, and the books are piling up, crammed sideways into bookshelves, clogging corners, silting up empty spaces. Given to us as gifts, found on curbsides, purchased, sent as review copies, or acquired through book readings of friends and colleagues, they accumulate as inevitably as dust. I find myself contemplating arranging them into some semblance of order: travel books, beloved favorites, research materials for novels I’ve written, dog-eared survivors of my childhood library, books that belong to my husband.

But then I think, someday we are going to move again. My husband, that grand collector of books, is prone to fantasizing about living in just about every dusty dorp or teeming metropolis in which we find ourselves on our frequent wanderings.

So instead of organizing our shelves, I lovingly take inventory, marking which books to keep, which to get rid of.