Ridding the bookshelves

I was an English teacher.  I taught reading and literature.  More importantly I am a reader.  I have been reading since I could put together words in a newspaper while I was sitting on the floor in The Little Brown House on 62.

So....getting rid of books.  How can I do that?  Books are full of life.  Books are precious.  Books are vibrant.  Books take the reader on many adventures, to places they can't travel on their own to meet people they might never encounter in every day life,

Mom had hundreds of books that Megan and I boxed up and took to the used bookstore in Wooster. Some of the titles looked interesting enough or were by authors I enjoyed so they made the trip back to our house.  That presented a problem for me...storage space.

A bookcase in Megan's old room.  A small bookcase in our bedroom.  Some storage on the coffee table.  That was all.  Since the coffee table was being replaced by the blanket chest, that space disappeared.  What to do?  What to do?

Get rid of some books.  Yikes!  Did I really say that?  The process was really quite easy.  Space by space, shelf by shelf, I pulled the books off the shelves and asked myself a version of the same questions,

"Have you read this? Will you ever read it? Is it just taking up space?"

Books I was keeping for teaching purposes were gone.  Books that were purchased or given to me for educational reasons were gone.  Several inspirational books just didn't interest me anymore, so they found a spot in the donation box.  When all the shelves were cleared and re-organized with the books to keep and the ones I had brought from Wooster, plus the few I had kept from the coffee table, I still had space for more and a nice box to take to the used bookstore in Wooster on the next trip.

Hard to part with books?  Yes, in a way.  But after thinking about it, the "maybe I will read it someday" didn't seem like a real possibility anymore.  Who was I kidding?  Some of them I really didn't want to read and I was using the "maybe someday" as a reason to hang onto them.  But the real driving force was this.  After the endless task and all of the frustration of cleaning out Mom's house and knowing she never got rid of anything, I didn't want to be like that.  Better for me to start the de-cluttering process now, on my terms, rather than leave volumes of books for the girls to pull off the shelves years from now,

Plus as soon as I finish a book, unless it is one I have used for an OBS or one that is really really good, it will be given to a friend or donated.  No more keeping books around forever.

Cross that task off the list!