I am trying to get many of the newest books as e-books but I have so many out of print books… My husband is trying to make me cull the books a bit, but just the idea of spending hours of my life scanning books then revising fucked OCR… I hope there’s a better way to deal with this.
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I had to stop and thank my television before I turned off her Netflix program.
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The system works! 
I think I had it around here somewhere … unless I tossed it.
But I still have those issues of The Dragon magazine, because I’m not stupid.
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fend sway
Marie Kondo must be stopped!
She is a risk to mankind what will everyone do when no one owns lots of crap.
People will lose their jobs making crap and everyone will starve to death.
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I heard the Ramkin family had quite and opposite approach to Ms.Kondo, and if you ask me who is more likeable… Well, I am very fond of Sybil and young Sam, you know.
Screw the “declutter” bullshit, it’s not the stuff that is the problem. Especially not books. It’s the obligations and social pressure, the lack of time to contemplate and read and comprehend books, in particular.
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Well, if you have the luxury (or past experience) to be able to think in dynastic terms, then throwing something away just because you don’t love it would be incredibly wasteful.
I mean your great-great grandchildren might love that manky old sofa.
Better put it up in the attic along with everything else your great-aunt left us… It’s horrible but it might become fashionable again in 50-60 years time, you never know.
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When we moved last, we donated/recycled/trashed (as appropriate) a lot of our pure junk. Then put things we weren’t sure about in maybe-keep boxes. Stuff with limited sentimental value. On the year anniversary of moving, anything in those boxes that hasn’t been retrieved will be donated.
This only works if you are proactive about unpacking not-maybe boxes and aggressive about filling the maybe-boxes in the first place. But moving can be a good opportunity and motivation to cut down.
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Get a new bookshelf or clear an old one and start rotating- anything you actually read goes on the last shelf. If you finish a book and it was pretty meh, it gets put in a donate pile. Everything else you read goes to live on the new shelf. When it is full, consilidate the others until you have a new empty one. Repeat for a year (or more, depending on your reading speed and collection size). Then cull wharever is left. When culling, if you cant remeber anything about the book after reading for 3 minutes, it goes because that means its a mediocre book for you.
Baseball cards and comic books used to appreciate in value because 99% of them were thrown out by kids (or parents after their kids left home). After collectors began to hoard new ones this appreciation more or less stopped because nothing became sufficiently rare. I bet Kondo’s end game to is make a mint on the collectibles market by hoarding copies of all the stuff she encourages others to throw out.
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I didn’t read her book, or rather I read a page or two and found it cloying somehow. May have just been my mental state at the time, I haven’t bothered to try to find out. Nevertheless I went on a multi-year purge, finally arriving at a point where I had a reasonable amount of things I actually use in places that I use them and in numbers that do not exceed what I am willing to clean. I knew it would be better but I didn’t know it would be this much better. I do expect I’ll be happier in the future for having let go of all of that stuff especially the things that I just didn’t want to have to go through/deal with. I think for a lot of people this will have been more than a fad and that’s great. So many of us have been raised with what I realize now is a pretty dysfunctional relationship with what ultimately amounts to literal trash.
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I really don’t know where to begin with this. The basic premises involved are so alien to me.
This presumes I have room for another bookshelf or room to put the books I take off an existing one. If I did, that space would already contain books…
What is this ‘pretty meh’? If I finished it by definition, it was worth reading and I want to keep it. If I haven’t finished it, then I will obviously do so at some point - won’t I? Won’t I? I probably won’t - but if I could internalise that I wouldn’t have a massive collection of unread books.
Plus you’re assuming I have ‘pretty meh’ books. If I thought the book was pretty meh, I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place.
But if I can’t remember it, it’s like a free book I haven’t read yet!
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I managed to get down to two full bookshelves but I don’t recommend my method. I tore down everything and piled it on the floor like trash until I hated the sight of it. Then I got a twinge of guilt about possibly losing more valuable books so I pulled those out. In doing so I realized some of them I should probably sell because honestly they’re not relevant to my life anymore. Once those were on the shelf I endured the resentful gaze of my poor innocent partner who never accumulated much stuff, while I procrastinated until I lost patience and just wanted to see the floor again. So I boxed everything up and put it in the garage. I told myself I’d fill one tall bookshelf and one short bookshelf and then re-assess. I found this so exhausting I resented the damned books after two twelve hour shifts so I went through to check for anything I just had to keep and then donated the whole lot. If I miss a book that much, I thought, I can just get another copy. So far that hasn’t happened once.
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Between working from home and my wife’s various diversions, if I threw out everything in the house that didn’t give me joy I’d be divorced and unemployed.
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Hmm. Yes, I can see how my advice might not be helpful for you. It sounds like you dont want to cull your books, which I totally understand. Maybe figure out how to line the ceilings with extra book shelves?
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This is such a privileged way of living. The basic idea is to constantly replace your stuff with stuff you like better.
Joy is such an ephemeral thing, coming and going. Most of my stuff is hobby/maker supplies which only spark joy when I am in the mind state to engage in that hobby.
And then there is Satisfaction. Most of my possessions are tools of one form or another, not designed or intended to produce joy themselves. They help me get the satisfaction of getting something else done.
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I think this is how Great Old Ones come to be. Non-euclidean geometry is invented by bibliophiles or possibly spontaneaously induced by libraries and old book shops.
See L-space
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That is incredibly awesome. Where is that?!
