Too Many Books

I’ve written a version of this post at least half a dozen times, but here we go again..

We need to get rid of some more books in our house. We’re having new floors put in on the main level and the upstairs in a few weeks, which means that everything will need to be removed from each room. As part of the prep for that, we’re trying to purge stuff now that we know we don’t need, so that we don’t end up moving it twice (or more) during the process of redoing the floors. And once again, I’m looking at our bookshelves and trying to find books to get rid of.

I’ve done this exercise several times in the past and donated hundreds of books to the library. This is just the latest pass. And it’s still hard every time I do it. Basically, removing books from my house forces a major shift in my thinking and, frankly, in my own self-conception. I was thinking this morning, as I did another pass and found another couple dozen books that I really don’t need to keep, that there are at least two wacky things going on in my head regarding the books.

First, when I was much younger, I always wanted to have a huge number of books – enough to have at least one room in my house be a ‘library.’ And so I meticulously made sure to keep all the books I acquired for a very long time – carting them along with me on move after move. Somehow, at a pretty early age, I just got into my head that having a big personal library was a Thing To Do.

Second, at an impressionable moment years and years ago, I heard someone disdainfully discuss someone who had no books visible in their house and what a lack of intellectualism that fact implied. So not only did it become important to have a library, but somehow I got into my head that I needed to have a lot of visible books in my house. And of course they had to be books that showed off a certain amount of intellectualism. So most of my computer science books and cheesy science fiction and Tom Clancy milporn have been tucked away on bookshelves in the basement, but the main level bookshelves contain Saramago and Rushdie and big fat tomes like “Europe: A History.”

But things have changed in the last 25 years – both for me and the wackiness in my head (haha) and for the world at large – when it comes to books.

With regard to needing to have a library, I’ve had a reversal of thinking about “stuff” and am now trying to reduce the amount of “things” around me that I need to keep track of. This is mostly inspired by GTD-style thinking. Do I really want my endless ToDos to include cleaning, maintenance, and curation of hundreds and hundreds of books that I will probably not read again? I had brief second thoughts after TLG was born – maybe he’ll want to read them! But somehow, I don’t think there’ll be any shortage of books for him to read, and keeping hundreds of books around on the off-chance that in 25 years he might want them just seems silly. There are a bunch of books I’ll keep for him, but not the whole pile.

And with regard to showing off books as some sort of evidence of intellectual heft. Bwah. Haha. Hahahahahaha! I’m old now and jaded and have hobnobbed with too many “intellectuals” to think that what books someone’s read bears at all on their capacity for critical thinking, or their basic human decency. And I really don’t care any more if someone wants to judge me based on what books they do or don’t see in my living room. So yeah, I got over that one. Mostly over it. I’m still keeping “Europe: A History” – at least for now.

Another big change, of course, has been technology. Who knew, 25 years ago, that the world of the written word would be what it is today? What with iPods and pdfs and Kindle and the promise of electronic ink on flexible plastic sheets (I’m holding out for that, rather than buying a Kindle.) Ok, ok, I know that some people have been envisioning this future for a long time. But they didn’t tell me when I was in junior high and started collecting my future library. Electronic storage is cheap, physical storage is not. We have laptops and iPods and the vast, vast intarWeb-thingie now. And the trend is for more and more to be available online. And if it’s not online, there’s the library, you know?

So I’m slowly transitioning from having to come up with criteria for what to get rid of, to having to come up with criteria for what to keep. It’s trivial in the grand scheme of things, of course, but in my own personal little headspace it’s been a real fundamental shift in my thinking and in my emotional reaction to my books.