I had a bunch of stuff for keeping in case I wanted to read it again, or put off till later, or bought the series but couldn’t get through the first book etc. When I realized this stuff had just been sitting most still in boxes for 10+ years I just said fuck it. I kept my Doc Savage and few other things like some signed books or ones I do like to go look at from time to time. The rest I took to the local Friends Of The Library and was happy that they would actually get read and enjoyed by others rather than sit in a box for 10 more years.
I am now actually pretty good at not gathering dead tree books. E-books on the other hand no thanks @doctorow for posting about humble book bundles I have an ever growing to read ‘pile’.
i have nothing but dead tree volumes in my library. when i struck out for colorado in 1990, having a promise of a job and a couch to crash on for a few weeks until i could get my shit together. i packed the car as full of my life as i could. i brought my electric bass and amp, i brought my clothes, i brought a few of my paintings, i brought my notebooks and copies of my poems, and i brought 4 boxes filled with books, about 350 that i couldn’t leave behind. i read them all, even the 26 volumes of the “proceedings of the warren commission.” i read most of “gravity’s rainbow” aloud on tape for a friend of mine across the country. i read passages of others to friends that visited. in my life so far i’ve rad 15-16000 books and i own about 20% of what i’ve read plus a few hundred i haven’t yet read.
I used to have rampant tsundoku, but I’ve largely recovered from it by realizing that it’s just another form of consumer materialism that I’ve been trying to cut out of my life, and by realizing that there’s a certain disrespect in buying more books than I know I can read or will ultimately have use for. I’ve adopted a strategy that serves me well:
Is it a reference I could need later that I won’t be able to acquire later when I need it?
Will I start reading it today with the intention of finishing it that week?
PDFs, on the other hand, I acquire and lose at high frequency.
I do this with fiction, although mostly I read e-books these days so there’s nothing to pass on and no need to find shelf space. I keep art books, poetry, stuff I’ll reread. And anything I want for referencing later, which in practice has meant a ton of nonfiction and textbooks. But novels and such I rarely read twice and would rather get them into the hands of a new reader, library or used book store so they can continue to be enjoyed.
When we moved to our new house a few years back, one of the only things that was truly for just me was lovingly unpack the books I’d had stored under our house maybe 20 years previous. My office turned into a nursery which reduced me to a single bookshelf, and then none at all when the another child came along. I missed my books.
Now my office has a full wall of gorgeous bookshelves my grandfather made decades ago and they are completely full of books. I’ve read almost every one of them, some multiple times. I still buy books now and again, but I’m getting close to being like this man - I have, looking at the single wall-mounted bookshelf above my computer, about a foot and a half left of empty bookshelf. I must be careful, I must be cautious.
