I reorganised my book collection a couple of weeks ago. I'd been meaning to do this for three or four years for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because I wanted to find a scheme where I didn't get the constant sense that the worthy books I'd repeatedly chickened out of reading were getting together to look down their noses and whisper about me. The task took a couple of days in total, which might seem like a long time, but was perhaps only to be expected for a job I'd convinced myself was tantamount to reclassifying my own internal organs.

Having dismissed my initial idea of filing my books in descending order of self-delusion, I decided to go for the more traditional approach of alphabetisation. Reference books that I would never read from cover to cover would be stored separately. This struck me as the most straightforward system, but led to some grey areas. I'd always intended to read Sir James George Frazer's 756-page guide to magic, The Golden Bough – a book that inspired The Wicker Man, but only because director Robin Hardy was so immobile in recovery from a heart attack that he actually got time to read it. Perhaps after a decade of resolutely failing to do so I should accept that it was a "dipper-inner"?

As someone without A-levels or a degree, who read no books except (some of) his GCSE English texts and golf instruction manuals from the age of 11 to 18, reading has always felt slightly like a game of catch-up, and I constantly beat myself up for what I haven't read. But getting my collection off the shelf taught me that I have, despite what I tell myself in my more self-flagellating moods, spent a fair bit of the last decade and a half having a decent crack at improving myself through literature, some of which was even written by proper grownups and everything. Though the fact remains that if I had a pound for every Camus book I have read I would have 27 pence, it turns out that I have read all of John Irving, Richard Russo, Meg Wolitzer and David Sedaris, and approximately 312 "great American novels" by TC Boyle, only approximately 471 fewer than he has written.

From 1999-2001, while living in London, I would go on epic, overambitious book-buying sprees, telling myself I was heading into town to "write in a cafe" only to return with bags laden with books from the hipper end of the US literary canon, perhaps hoping that the sheer fact that I owned them would turn me into the writer I wanted to be. When I think of the way my book shelves looked when I was 23, I realise they perhaps were no more about me than they were about a stranger I subconsciously imagined would one day visit my house. This stranger was an uncommon combination of extremely tasteful, hugely judgmental and ridiculously attractive.

I waited very patiently for this stranger for quite a while, only for the finicky bastard not to show. Somewhere along the way, I became a more honest book owner: I now know that nine times out of 10 I'll enjoy a book about a dysfunctional family or the comedies of small-town American life more than I will one about a drug addict or rock star. I don't hold on to books I didn't enjoy – even those that critical wisdom told me I "should" have – and I no longer keep a copy of Gravity's Rainbow around the house for hypothetical purposes.

Still, in seeing my books spread across the floor, I realised that a hint of my fantasy life as a reader remained. Did I actually enjoy The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, or did I just convince myself I did, because the person who told me that I would when I was 19 spoke in a very persuasive, quiet voice? I really enjoyed the lone Robertson Davies book I've read, but owning the latest versions of all his books and the original Penguin paperbacks of six of them is more a mark of the hardcore, epic Canadian mystical comic novel aficionado I want to be than the slightly touristy one I am.

Of course, some of these excesses are simply a by-product of that elastic thing that can happen to time when we are in a bookshop, where our sheer good intentions and excitement overrule everything we have previously learned about how many hours there are in a day. Just as I keep on subscribing to the New Yorker magazine in the expectation of a lengthy, debilitating illness that will allow me to catch up on 15 years' worth of issues I have hardly skimmed, I'm keeping The Golden Bough in preparation for the non-fatal heart attack that will ultimately enable me to read it. That's a lot of sickness in my future, but I'm embracing it. I suppose that's the joy of a proper, unexpurgated book reorganising session: it makes you look forward to the good times, and the bad.