THERE is a new chapter in the story of the book, thanks to a decluttering guru. Marie Kondo, the presenter of the new Netflix series Tidying Up, has told viewers that she limits the number of books in her house to 30.

Her recommendation has sparked controversy, from people outraged that books could possibly be regarded as “clutter” to authors including Susan Hill, who said that she is “not tidy but even if I were, books don’t count”, and Lionel Shriver, who explained that “without rectangular reminders, I’d be more apt to forget the experience of reading them”.

Rose Tremain also said that “rare works of brilliance” deserve to become our life companions and literary editor Stig Abell said that chucking out his books would be “an act of self-harm”.

Of course, these are all people who have a vested interest in books and would always have strong feelings about them, but books also arouse powerful emotions in many of us. They exert a kind of hold over us avid readers, not just because of the story within but also because of the individual associations and memories they provoke. I have kept, and will always keep, my first copy of Wuthering Heights, a Penguin edition now falling apart, because it takes me back to my early teenage years, when I first read it and was so gripped by its difficult yet evocative language and the violence of its romance I read it again and again and again.

Our bookshelves groan under the weight of books ranging from fiction such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, Need You Dead by Peter James and Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud to non-fiction including Taliban by Ahmed Rashid, Savage Girls and Wild Boys by Michael Newton and Great Parliamentary Scandals by Matthew Parris. In between are beautiful coffee table hardbacks, gardening books and several shelves of travel books that reflect my husband’s travels abroad.

Snobbishly, I have gathered together all the classics in one bookshelf, hoping that visitors to our kitchen will be impressed that I regularly read Dickens, Austen and Chekhov.

We have so many books that I have often stared around our house in desperation to try to identify a spare nook where I could possibly nudge in another bookcase because our existing ones have books piled upon books and are overflowing onto the floors around them.

Clutter can make us stressed because we feel out of control of our living space yet for me it’s almost a physical pain to think of “chucking” some books out in the interests of decluttering. Our house would feel soulless without books.

Perhaps a love of books is a generational thing. All the studies show that time spent reading for pleasure among teenagers has been replaced by time on screens, the joy of losing yourself in a world of imagination replaced by a world of YouTube clips.

By contrast, consider this story I heard from a friend who travelled to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso in Africa. Its library is guarded by armed guards, who are protecting its books from teenagers who try to steal them because they are desperate to read but are too poor to buy or borrow books.

Here, we don’t need to heed the warning by George Orwell in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother ordered all books to be burned because they imparted “dangerous” ideas to the population it wanted to control.

Now, the authorities simply close libraries, always the first thing to suffer when costs have to be cut. Almost 500 libraries around the country have been closed in the past eight years, with existing libraries shrinking their book stock by 14 million books.

Thank goodness for campaign groups like Save Hove Library (www.facebook.com/savehovelibrary), which recently put a leaflet through our letterbox saying that there have been four proposals in the past 12 years to close the Carnegie Library. The Hove Library is again in danger of closure because of a proposed cut of £250,000 to libraries in next month’s council budget.

“Readers deserve better than this,” the leaflet reads: adding: “A lifetime’s joy, well-stocked libraries are socially resonant at modest cost”.

We buy about 190 million books each year in this country, down from 344 million in 2011 but libraries, of course, provide access to books for people who can’t afford to buy new each time, thus opening up a whole world of the written word for the least well off.

It’s a sobering thought that the younger generation, brought up on the internet, may not even miss them when they’re gone.