Thanks to Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett for encouraging me in my herculean efforts to reduce my book collection – 350 have gone to the Oxfam bookshop in the last year (Reading is precious. But the cult of book ownership can be smug and middle-class, 23 January). Mindful of the excellent Japanese term tsundoku that she mentions, if I decide I am unlikely to read – or reread – them, out they go.
Caroline Ewans
London
• I also remember the day King George VI died (Letters, 23 January). Like Edward Spraggon, I was four; and lived in Newcastle upon Tyne. I spent the whole day singing “The king’s dead” to the tune of The Keel Row. My embarrassed mother could not stop me singing it, even on the bus into town. This was well before I knew the word republicanism.
Joanna Liddle
Ledbury, Herefordshire
