LIKE pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to about it, I resisted getting a Kindle for quite some time. ‘There’s just something about the feel of a book that you don’t get with an electronic device’, was the usual comment, though sometimes, oddly, it was the smell that others preferred.

When I was given one as a birthday present a few years ago, I immediately stocked it up with out of copyright classics for free - Frankenstein, Dracula, stuff I’d read years previously and adored, but which I’d lost copies of in the intervening decades.

I marvelled at the difference in price between buying a new paperback or hardback and their digital equivalent, and gleefully whipped through them, or read the free chapters before deciding to take the plunge or not.

But in the years since receiving a Kindle (other brands of electronic reading devices are available), I haven’t stopped buying good, old-fashioned analogue books. I find it nigh-on impossible to pass a charity shop without ducking in to scan the book and DVD racks, and while I’m getting better at leaving empty handed, I’ll still probably pick something up two or three times out of five.

Then they go home, and get added to the ever-increasing ‘To Watch’ or ‘To Read’ piles, and get added to my ‘I’ll get around to it’ list.

Whenever I buy a book, I immediately place the receipt into the pages for use as a simple bookmark. If I could be bothered, I’m sure I could have a look at the teetering stack of novels and non-fiction on my bedside table and work out exactly how far behind on my ‘To Read’ pile I am.

The problem is, and I’m certain I’m not alone in this, I’ll pick up a book while a certain mood takes me - hello, Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story Of The Legendary 30 Assault Unit - and be confident I’ll crack on with it as soon as I’ve finished whatever I’m on with, but get distracted by a magazine article, or fascinated by some other topic, and it’s back on the pile.

Other times, I’ll get part way through a book and, however determined I am to finish, I have to try something else, because I’m not even seeing words any more, just shapes on a page.

Occasionally, I’ll find something such a slog I’ll just put it down for a little while and quickly plough through something pulpy and fun - hello, Robert L Pike’s Mute Witness, the basis for Bullitt - as a sort of palate cleanser. A Steve McQueen-flavoured sorbet between chapters of heavy-going tedium.

Sometimes it’s because the book just isn’t gripping me, other times I’ll just end up busy for a while and won’t pick it up for a week or so, and by then it’s lost whatever draw it had.

That’s what happened with A Briefer History Of Time - I saw a documentary, got briefly fascinated by physics and received the (only very slightly), dumbed-down version of Professor Stephen Hawking’s famous book as a gift.

It sat on the shelf for five years, despite a couple of false starts, until a couple of months ago when - after one flat-Earth argument too many - I was determined to get through it, start to finish. Amazing what a desire for argument ammunition can do for your reading desires, even if the later chapters were more than a little perplexing.

Now and again though, I’ll just give up, with a promise to myself I’ll try again another time - hello, Wuthering bloody Heights! I’ve tried four times to read that novel - which I’m reliably informed is a stone cold classic - and while I’ve made progress each time, I’ve barely made it past the halfway point before having to give up and move on.

One of the best things about reading a proper book is seeing the bookmark move slowly (in some cases), down the spine as you plough through it, and that’s something you don’t really get with an e-book. Sure, you see a little percentage measurement, but it’s not the same.

This was meant to be a column on the dangers of hoarding (because my ‘To Read’ pile got a bit too tall this week and took a tumble), but now I’m wrapping it up I realise it’s actually a way to put in writing the fact I’ve based my entire knowledge of a classic of the English language on a 1978 Kate Bush song, and use its publication to spur me on to get the damn thing read.

Come back next year and see how I get on, and well done if you made it through without getting distracted and moving on to something else.