CULLING MY BOOKS: on reading, reveling, and releasing

Part of my silent time over the past two months has been occupied with the process of sorting through my possessions. "Sorting through" sounds simple and rather serene, but in reality the process is tedious and messy. I gave away or otherwise disposed of the stuff that was easy years ago. What is left is there for a reason. Usually, even, a good one.

Still, something in my soul said that it was time for much of it to go.

Culling my collection of books was one of the more interesting, and oddly enough for a writer the easiest, parts of the process. Perhaps because my work requires me to acquire new books regularly, I've never been especially reluctant to let the older ones go. It's easy to imagine someone else, in say our local library's Used Book Depot, enjoying the volume I've just donated—to imagine, that is to say, the cycle of ownership and reading continuing pleasantly and productively on before and beyond the point in time I happen to own a book. And it's always been clear to me that if I don't empty the shelves out fairly regularly, the house will all too quickly become overrun.

My test for keeping books is generally simple, consisting of only three questions. Do I truly love the book? Do I return to it regularly? Is it out of print, and likely to remain out of print for the foreseeable future? Of the three questions the last is the most practical and sometimes the most compelling. Living in a small town rather than my old home ground of New York City, the lesser works of, say, W.H. Auden or Virginia Woolf are not easy to obtain; even online old-book resources such as Alibris can be spotty in terms of book availability and price. Some of the paperback editions of so-called "literary" authors I bought back in the seventies are thus real treasures to me, in contrast to recent and/or mainstream novels and nonfiction that the library is likely to own and that Amazon and other retailers are equally likely to stock.

So I let go of several shelf-fulls of contemporary novels and nonfiction with only the slightest qualm. More difficult were a group of books on writing I like, but which don't meet the test of my first or second questions. Even more difficult were some of the books from my father's personal library (the subject for a later blog post). Like most objects once owned by someone loved and lost, so to speak, these volumes were not valuable as books so much as what author Seth Godin calls "souvenirs." My three practical questions didn't apply to them well; instead, a whole other kind of scrutiny had to take place.

As always seems to be the case in the aftermath of one of these book clearing-outs, I have found myself reading more widely than usual in my own collection of books. I am inspired to revisit authors I had forgotten, discovering that I like so-and-so more than I used to and so-and-so less, being surprised that I never finished one book or that I made the notes I did in another. In this way my little library comes alive again right at the times some of it is passing on, as though the very process of loss have intensified its pleasure and value...not unlike, say, life itself.