bookshelves

[adrian_turtle]

I spent all my time at home during the first months of Covid, culling my books in an extremely leisurely fashion. I would check that the roof was still not leaking anywhere near the desk nor any of the bookshelves. Plenty of time! Plenty of space! Still...I knew I would eventually need to move, and it's easier to find an apartment with space for 4 bookcases than space for 6. (I double-shelve paperbacks.) And it's much easier to get rid of books gradually, with time to consider the matter, than in a last-minute panic while the movers are on their way.

Sometimes I would pick up a book and read 4 pages and think "Why did I ever buy this? WHY?" Sometimes I'd read the whole book, hoping it would get better after the first few chapters. (Nope.) Or I'd realize the misogyny fairy had hit it too hard for me to want it on my shelves. (I'm keeping the Mary Renault, though.) It would have gone faster if I could just smile at a book I wanted to keep and leave it on the shelf, but sometimes I thought "Oh, I haven't read this in years!" and just had to pick it up and remind myself how wonderful it was before putting it back. A slow process.

Comments

[elusiveat]

Thank you for this snapshot of your life.

I guess one important question is whether the leisurely culling accomplished what you hoped it would accomplish?

[adrian_turtle]

I probably accomplished about half of what I wanted by that leisurely process of getting rid of books I don't like anymore. Then a few months ago Vicki and Andy and I decided we wanted to move in together and started looking at apartments...there is not going to be nearly enough bookspace. Given a choice of being stuck for 3 months in an apartment with 2 people I love and dire bookcase limitations, and being stuck ALONE in an apartment with plenty of bookcases, I believe I am making the correct choice. But I have not culled nearly enough.

[elusiveat]

Alas!

Good luck speeding it up, then, I guess?

[evalerie]

Having culled and donated 80 bags of books when my partner died, I am a big fan of decluttering so that someday when someone has to clean up *my* stuff there will hopefully be less of it for them to go through. I've made some progress at it, but there is a long, long, long way left to go.

[evalerie]

Also: My partner left behind three Kindles when he died. One day I found out that all of them needed an update because they used the 2G cell network, which was going away, so if I didn't update them by a certain date then they would never work again. So I spent an entire day chasing around to locate power cords and instructions to check and update each one of them. I hadn't even been using any of them, but turning them into e-waste when they still worked perfectly well seemed like a bad idea. After that, I gave away all three of them, so that I will never spend an entire day updating Kindles again. I figure that the less stuff I have, the less time it will take up to store it, update it, clean it -- whatever it needs, if I get rid of it, I won't have to do it, and getting that out of my life feels good.