"Spring," says Mole, in The Wind in the Willows, setting about his spring-cleaning, "was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing." March was clearly the month for authors to attempt their own bookish spring-cleans, with James Patterson donating 200,000 of his own novels to the US army, and Mario Vargas Llosa giving more than 30,000 books from his personal library to his home town of Arequipa.

"A lot of men and women will get a book and a feeling that people over here are thinking about them," said Patterson of his army donation, which includes his thrillers Tick Tock and The Postcard Killers. "There are certain things we can't do. We can't solve the economic crisis. But this is something I felt I could do to help."

The Nobel prize-winning Peruvian author, meanwhile, is going a little more upmarket with his donation, which is in the process of being collected from his homes in Lima, Madrid and Paris. Vargas Llosa said the majority of the books are literature and he has written personal notes in almost all of them, according to Peruvian press .

Now I've got over my initial jealousy/horror at the thought of a 30,000-strong personal library – I thought I had it bad, but my teetering towers of books can only number in the hundreds – I am loving the idea of these whopping literary donations. I make a trip every few weeks to our local charity shop, or post on Freecycle, to try to keep my own mushrooming "personal library" (yes, I think I shall call it that in future, Vargas Llosa-style) in check, but these giveaways are on a different scale.

So, if you were a literary name, where would you donate your own thousands of books, were you ever to want to – and whose personal library would you like to see coming to your home town?