I very rarely do any journalism. I'm not very good at it. However, I like this piece on caring for books which I wrote for the Scottish Book Collector.

The specialist shops that advertise in the Scottish Book Collector would be well advised to bar their doors if they see me coming, because I am the Genghis Khan of book care. A quick glance from where I sit reveals a hardback copy of P. G. Wodehouse's 'Money for Nothing', minus the hardback, a 'Penguin Classical Dictionary' that emerged from two different boxes last time I moved, and David Copperfield lying open, squashed under a cushion, face down on the floor. And David Copperfield is such a great book. Dickens' prose just amazes me with its power of evoking memory. Consequently I have reduced my copy to a state in which it would now be rejected by a charity shop.

It is very unfair on the books, particularly as the more they've meant to me, the worse I've treated them. 'Bleak House', which took me by surprise with its shift in narration from the first to the third person, something I didn't know you were allowed to do in the 19th century, now lies stricken in my bedroom after I took it to the Lido and failed to protect it from the children's water chute.

I borrowed heavily from the structure of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions' for my first novel. I remember it well, which if fortunate as my copy has now departed, ripped, battered and ultimately lost in transit. I was very influenced by Voltaire's 'Candide' when writing Lux the Poet which probably explains why my 'Candide' is now missing its front cover and has gone really quite a strange colour for a book.

I love reading Aristophanes' plays, partly because they demonstrate that people's motivations have nor changed greatly through the ages. His characters have family problems and want little more than a quiet life occasionally spiced up with some partying. So Aristophanes, understanding human nature as he did, might not mind that my editions of his plays are currently buried beneath my computer, lifting it up a few inches so I can avoid neck strain.

I like having books around. However, it doesn't matter to me what the original is like because I'll ruin it anyway by cramming it in my pocket to read on the bus, turning down the corner of the page for a bookmark, then finish it off by dropping it in the bath. My shelves are absolutely full of books puffed and swollen after being dropped in a hot bath. Why do they never go back to the right shape? I had all seven of Jane Austen's novels in a nice little box but now, made fat by immersion, they don't fit. And I stood on the box anyway.

Some of my books are barely even recognisable as books. My 'Vanity Fair' looks like something a dog has played with. I have to hide it from visitors. This cavalier treatment of books seems almost to amount to a wilful appetite for destruction. Taking good care of your books seems to be ingrained in most of the population so I don't know what went wrong with me. Possibly it is just because as someone who writes books for a living, I don't want to let the damn things rule my life.

Taking my destructive habits into consideration, what I mainly need from a book is that it is cheap. There is no point spending a lot of money on something that's only going to end up under an overturned plate of buttered toast. When Wordsworth started putting out their £1 editions, thereby sticking a well deserved knife into those greedy people at Penguin Classics, it was a huge help to my collection. 'The Expedition of Humphry Clinker' by Tobias Smollett was never going to accompany me home at £9.99, which would have been a great loss, as it's a fine novel. But at only £1 it just leapt off the shelf and onto my floor.

I'm reading 'Cicero on Government' just now. Cicero is my favourite Roman. He was notoriously vain, so I imagine he'd be pleased he is still being read two thousand years after his death. But I suspect he would strongly disapprove of me spilling an entire pot of tea over his political speeches. Myself, I regard tea stains as commonplace, hardly to be noticed. If the worst a book suffers is a tea stain it can count itself lucky. Another Roman I admire is Julius Caesar, though he was Cicero's enemy. I find his writings inspiring because they reveal a man of such phenomenal energy that it makes me feel guilty about being slumped in front of the TV, and gets me up to do some writing. Julius Caesar was a great soldier and must have been used to harsh conditions. So I feel he wouldn't mind too much that my copy of the 'Civil War' has a cigarette burn through the front cover. A lot worse things than that happened when the Roman Republic was collapsing in chaos.

When I wrote 'Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving' I spent a long time in the British Library, looking for references to Queen Mab. She first appeared in Romeo and Juliet, and when the librarian actually handed over an extremely rare first edition, 400 years old, for me to take away to a desk, unsupervised, I could only stare at him in astonishment. There are only five of these in the world. Giving one to me made it pretty likely there would soon be four. I coped, but it was a close thing. If anyone at the British Library could see the state of my bookshelves, they'd have an injunction out forbidding me from approaching the building, So, to sum up. Don't lend me your favourite books if you know what's good for them.