When I was little, I read a lot. I was lucky, and was also read to for a time before my parents either felt I was doing all right on my own, or they didn’t have as much time anymore; I don’t remember which. My mother read me little Ladybird books, and books with nursery rhymes in – she always skipped over The Twelve Days of Christmas because she felt it was ‘too Christian’; I was maybe three or four, so I’m not sure I would have cared, and I missed out on a good counting rhyme – and my father read me cookbooks, in the hope that when I grew up I would cook for him.

My parents were quite happy to buy me books, whatever books I wanted. They were always insistent that I should be able to read, write and speak good English, especially my mother, so the fact that I was happy to read must have thrilled them.

But I never had a library.

I had school libraries, yes. But the books were pre-selected, and were still from the era of its British founders from 1893, and despite the fact that I was in school between 1986 and 1994, the books seemed to not change very much. There were rarely new books, very few current books, so it was hard for me to find something I actually wanted to read in my school libraries.

And because of the strict school rules, we weren’t allowed to carry in books that weren’t either textbooks or books that were from the school library. They would be confiscated, and you’d never see them again. Which led me to become my school’s Roald Dahl contraband dealer: I would sneak in books by Roald Dahl, secure them in hiding, and friends would borrow them, secreting them home and returning them to me when they were done.

(There were other dealers. There was definitely a dealer in Sweet Valley High books, and another in teenage horror fiction, but if we each knew who the others were, we never spoke of it. It was strange times, but perhaps schools in Malaysia were a little stranger then.)

Nick, on the other hand, grew up mostly in a library. He would find books he otherwise might not have found. He got shown books upon which he might otherwise have not have cast a second glance. He read so much and so widely, especially in science fiction and fantasy, that sometimes I could pull the name of an author I’d never heard of, and he would have read them.

His dad had started reading him The Hobbit when he was about five, so he tells me, and they moved on to The Fellowship of the Ring not long after. Not long after that, Nick took off by himself, to read on his own, and never stopped. I don’t think anyone in the Irish house ever did stop reading.

(The rectangular shapes of many of the Christmas presents are not accidental. I did marry into a reading family.)

Books in his home were not often brand new, but inherited, or got second-hand. They seem more precious that way, because I guess it feels to me that they had to be obtained, whereas I probably took for granted the ease in which I could acquire books. We have his dad’s copies of Stephen Donaldson’s The First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Dad, if you’ve been looking for them: sorry! – and they’re beautiful and battered and well-loved. A lot of our books look this way now.

Our two reading histories led to two different reactions when we found out that we were getting a new local library in Canada Water. A proper big library. Not a school one with its limited and locked-down books, not a university one filled with reference texts – though I loved my university library a great deal – but a real library.

Nick just smiled knowingly, as if this was always going to happen, like leaves falling in autumn. I was beside myself with excitement. My own library.

It was much more important to us, I suppose, because elsewhere in the country, many libraries were facing closure. Even libraries in London were in danger. And yet here we were, with a shining new library, complete with convention space, meeting rooms and soon a new outdoor courtyard. We are among the luckiest and most grateful people in the country, and we know it.

I took out my first real library book last week. A book not on a class reading list, or one that had the essay I needed to read before my next seminar. A book I wanted.

Nick came home to find me in my office, on my beanbag, reading. After dinner, the flat was quiet, because I continued to read. He was reading, too, at his desk.

It is the nicest feeling in the world.