Vickie and I moved to France with a lorry load of books. Nothing is more calculated to induce a loathing of the printed word than carrying the contents of forty boxes up a nine foot ladder. Why have I for twenty years toted around The Use and Indications of Bowel Nosodes? When did I last need Hints on Tiger Shooting? With all available shelves full and thirty boxes still to unpack, we must once again face the fact that we have too many books.

Books gobble up wall space, so you can't hang paintings. They leave no room for storage. A book addict's house will typically be full of piles of dusty papers. Some people manage not to hoard books. Sartre, when he lived in hotels, would read them and pass them on. I can't bear to let go. Last time we attempted a cull I sifted through thousands of volumes and in the end was willing to part with just one, a catering textbook called The Waiter. Then it occurred to me that waiters overhear interesting things and I might one day need to know how lobster thermidor is served with fork and spoon. I haven't seen the book since. It's somewhere in those thirty boxes but soon it will be gone, because we have vowed to keep only as many books as we can fit in one room.

What should our ideal library contain? Vickie and I began listing essentials, mostly classic fiction. This quickly revealed great gaps in our reading and before long we were adding all sorts of things that we don't yet have, but want to read. If this seems an odd way to get rid of books, it actually has a certain sudoku-like logic – without knowing how many books you're going to end up with, how can you possibly know how many to cull?

A short list of books worth discovering

Vickie and Indra's long list of classic fiction

Anthony Burgess's favourite novels, 1939-1983

Sueddeutsche Zeitung's list of 50 great novels

The Classical Bookworm