I was an English major, and have acquired an entire bookcase worth of novels, plays, literary anthologies, criticism, classics, and poetry collections that I know I will never–ever–read again. And sprinkled in with that are a healthy dosage of books that I never read in the first place. Something tells me that I’m not unique amongst English majors in this final category. Realizing that having proof of being reasonably well-read was bringing me less happiness than an overflowing bookcase was bringing me upset, I decided to get rid of all the stuff that I didn’t want or need anymore.
It was a pretty torturous process–oh, I’ll get around to reading Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist someday (no I won’t); it’s good to have a copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature around (no isn’t); what if I want to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test again? (go to the library)–but by the time was said and done, I’d filled up old beer boxes with 85 books. It felt incredibly freeing; I think I’m going to go to work on Round 2 pretty soon. Maybe I’ll start a 1-for-1 policy: if a new book comes in, an old one has to go.
People have so much trouble getting rid of their old books. No matter how ratty, outdated, or uninteresting the volumes may be, people are always trying to find a good home for them. There’s a real antipathy towards the idea of throwing books in the garbage. I’m certainly no exception to this, and so it was great to discover Google Books. Before listing the books on Amazon.com or bringing them in for credit at my local used book store, I added them to my “library” in Google. Each book was tagged with the reason I had the book in the first place (e.g. “college”) and whether or not I got around to reading it before giving it the old heave-ho. Now, in the highly unlikely event that I decide I absolutely need to re-read Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy, I’ve got institutional memory of having owned it, and I can either read the text online, borrow it from the library, or re-acquire a used copy.
To borrow a computing metaphor, it’s like moving old data off-site to an Iron Mountain facility. And I’m that much closer to being free of the burden of unwanted crap I just can’t seem to throw away.