What to do with all those books.
From a piece on Salon...
Some of the choices are relatively painless; it’s almost a relief to discover that part of the bibliophilic undergrowth I’m cutting through is the result of duplicate copies. My wife and I had some books in common when we tied the knot and merged our libraries, and in narrowing two sets of Jane Austen’s novels to one, we’re voting with confidence on the future of our marriage.
More difficult has been letting go of the ideal of the complete set — the notion that because I like some works of a treasured author, I am under some moral obligation to his entire oeuvre. I love the novelist Clyde Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt,” for example, but I’m not so crazy about some of his other efforts at fiction, such as “Red Eye” and “Killer Diller.” I’m enthralled by the memoirs and novels of the late Reynolds Price, but I’m less enamored with his poems. And so, with the heartless resolve required to break up any family, I kept a few books from these writers on the shelf but gave others the heave-ho.
Some books land in the discard pile because, like the slacks in my closet from seasons past, they simply no longer fit me. With my children now older, I don’t need a copy of “Caring for Your School-Age Child: Ages 5 to 12.” Giving up on a crackpot scheme to plant a backyard orchard also enabled me to toss any number of books on fruits and berries. I had trouble remembering, as I threw a foreign-language dictionary on the weeding pile, how I had ever hit upon the idea that I could teach myself Japanese.
1 comment:
Shedding books is like kicking out your children. Sometimes it has to be done. But it is still painful.
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