Time to sweep the shelves. I've got more books than room, some of them dating back to grade school. Time to ditch a few, box them up and release them into the wild. Maybe take the cleanest down to the local used bookstore and swap them for yet more books.
Mercedes Lackey and her horse stories for lonesome and misunderstood teens: gone. Piers Anthony and his bad puns and inappropriate sex: gone. Thomas Harris, Dean Koontz, Elizabeth Peters, all those middling novels bought at Goodwill to pass a lunch hour: outta here.
Honestly, I'm keeping most of them. I have hopes of passing Harriet the Spy and Sport and the Oz books (both Baum and Thompson) and Rascal and so on along to my nephews as they grow and learn to love reading. I'll always keep plenty of paperback sf around to reread when I want something familiar or a fiend mentions needing something to read on a trip. The classics - Shakespeare, Twain, Kipling, Eliot, Lewis - stay because what use is a library without them?
I dream of a time when I have room to line the walls with books. A time when I do not have to stack them in double layers, hiding titles. When it would be practical to keep them alphabetically instead of wherever they fit. That day is not today. But every box I tote out of here helps.
Hey, want a book?
4 comments:
I want all the books. That is why I have too many books. Many of them crap.
So many crap books. So many. I mean, why do I still have piers Anthony books? WHY?
Do you have my copy of Rascal or do I?
I have the paperback version I got for Christmas one year along with a copy of Cheaper By the Dozen. The fact that I remember that shows how important those books were to me.
Post a Comment