On the Possession of (Mostly Fictional) Books

It's funny; I used to be the type of person who never purchased books.
 I didn't see the point in spending money on something that's going to last me half an afternoon—a whole day, or two, if I was unusually lucky—and might never reread. But in the last several months, that's started changing. Oh, I wouldn't buy books on a whim, and I still much prefer to read them for free (via the four libraries to which I have cards, plus the heavensent MeLCat interlibrary loan).
 Yet there are books I would buy (some of which I already have bought) in a heartbeat if I could afford them—Tolkien's works, for example, which I will probably never stop adulating until I die—and most of C. S. Lewis' works, Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, Tosca Lee's books,  Francine Rivers' Mark of the Lion trilogy and Redeeming Love, Karen Hancock's The Light of Eidon, and L. B. Graham's The Binding of the Blade series. And there are some books that I don't know if, no matter how many times I've read them already, I'd really reread them once I owned them (weird phenomenon that's happened to me before), but they're so beautifully written and I loved them so the first time through that it feels like a crime not to own them, like Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series, The Books of Pellinor series by Alison Croggon, and Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy. Then there are the books, like Castle In the Attic and my Black Stallion novels, that I already own and reread even long after I've outgrown them, because it's almost as much paper nostalgia as my own childhood journals. Then there's books I ended up with and have utter intention of reading eventually, such as Julius Caesar (by Shakespeare)  or The Once and Future King; and the books I have read and can't recall a word of, like The War of the Worlds. And the books that I cried over the first time I read them, but have not reread since purchasing, such as Memoirs of a Geisha. And then there are books that I feel like I ought to own because they're classics, but I have only marginal interest in actually reading. And there's books that I may not have even read all the way through, but am somehow convinced that owning them adds somehow to my quality of life, like my four anthologies of Irish myths, or my three-inch thick "concise" French-English dictionary.  And the books I didn't realize I'd outgrown until I spent money on them, like the Dragonspell series.  And the book series that were really good when you bought the first books, but now that the last book is out, you realize you don't really care about the plot anymore but you feel like you should buy it so you'll own the complete series (Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle).  And the books that looked good in Barnes & Noble yet turned out to be worth about as much effort as it would take to throw them off a cliff, like The Summer King by O. R. Melling.

It's funny (again) that, unlike many people with whom I've chatted, going to college has not made me sick of reading; it's made me want to really know what I'm reading.