I used to spend up big on new and used books. In my 30s and 40s, I had a library that covered the walls of the second floor of my house. I was a big fiction and non-fiction reader – and poetry too. I used to think there was an intellectual pay-off by reading so much. That reading was making me ‘better’ like health food. I taught writing at a university and I was a journalist, so reading widely was part of my trade.

But if I’m honest, it was closer to elitism. I could talk the leg off a chair about Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Heller, Vonnegut and the post moderns. I enjoyed the stories and some never left me. Dickens for example and some of Hemingway’s short stories.

After 40 years of reading, there are maybe only 40 books that I go back to again and again, like a pupil to a Zen master or to a stream, where the fishing was good and bountiful.

A few years ago, I gave half of my books away to charity. There were 50 boxes. I didn’t miss them. I’d spent thousands of hours reading them. It was time to say goodbye. They no longer provided meaning for me. My voracious reading appetite had gone, replaced by a more minimalist practice. I now read a handful of books closely. I’m after flavour not volume.

I don’t advise kids and young people to adopt my ‘less is more’ maxim. But chewing through books like a termite through wood, has lost its appeal. The joy of reading comes from understanding. I re-read books I read many years ago, and it’s like I’ve come to them for the first time. Sometimes less can be more.