The final book purge

We took the last of the books in to sell at the resale shop this afternoon. It’s the end of an era.

Many of them this time were the wife’s books, but also the last of my library. Or rather half my library. When I married the wife, we had to start downsizing as the goal was to move to the house she and her first husband had bought a number of years ago to use as a retirement home. It’s a small house and there isn’t enough room for my entire library. When I moved into my house in 1999, I moved in with fifty-six (56) boxes of books. By the time I married the wife, sold my house and moved out I doubled that amount.

I moved 56 boxes of books to the retirement house when I got married, which left 56 boxes worth of books to jettison. Over the last four and a half years, I’ve been selling off my collection. There was much sorting and agonizing when I had to pare down my library. I went through all my library and did an immediate gut-reaction ‘keep’ or ‘discard’. Sort of like Marie Kondo’s putting your hands on things in your house and deciding if they bring you happiness or not, I did that with every book in my library.

There are some books and authors that are essential to my personality and character. Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Spider Robinson, et. al. They went into the ‘keep’ section without a second thought.

The ‘discard’ section was a little harder but not by much. There were books that I had read and decided I would not need to read again. Some were on topics I no longer had any interest in.

Everything that was left was the hard part. By my very nature, it is difficult for me to let go of books, in spite of what I said in the paragraph above. The ‘discard’ books were only being let go as a matter of necessity. Given my druthers, I’d still have them in my library. You never know when the information inside one of the books might come in handy. Besides, it’s not hoarding if it’s books.

I had to go through the remaining books and sort them into keep or discard piles. Some were relatively easy, some not so much. Eventually I had the keep half and the discard half.

It’s strange when you take books in to sell off and you end up getting more books. And I usually get books as Christmas gifts. I just can’t help acquiring more books. Books are so integral to my psyche that I think I should go mad without access to them.

The hardest part of letting go of half my library is that I regrettably had not gotten to read all of the books. I admit I feel cheated. All my life people kept saying “When you’re older, you can sit around and read books”, or “when you retire, you’ll have time to read books”. So, I collected all my books and stored them away, like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter, so I could have them to read ‘later’. And yet, ‘later’ came and I’ve had to get rid of my books and I don’t have them to read. I can hear my earlier self screaming “It’s NOT FAIR!” like a petulant five year-old. I suppose my current self could feel jaded and cynical over this. But that doesn’t get my books back and I still can’t read them.

To be fair, I have read a lot of books in my life. I mean, like, A LOT. And maybe I won’t have time in this life to finish reading all the ones I still have in my library that I haven’t read yet. Maybe I should take this as an indication that I need to be more selective in my reading choices. At the very least, it’s a sign that I need to put more reading back into my routine. I maybe get a book a month read. I’ve got so much shtuff going on I can barely keep track of it all. But reading has always been, and still remains, important to me.

It is time to insert more reading time into my days, jealously guard that time, and viciously defend it against any and all intrusions upon it. If I’d done that up until now, instead of doing useless things like working, I’d have read more of my library and I might have found that the ‘discard’ pile might have been justified. I’ll only find that out by reading the remainder of my library.

I hope you’re enjoying your own library, my Hordeling.

If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum