Woo hoo!
Two major accomplishments today.
The first should have been traumatic but somehow wasn’t- I purged my bookcases. I freely admit that I am a compulsive book hoarder, something I partially learned from my mother. She has always been of the opinion that you should have any information you need at your fingertips, which led her to have bookcases in every room of her house, save the bathrooms. I’ve inherited that trait- I can’t get rid of a book that has something in it I might ever possibly need again. It doesn’t matter that I could always buy the book again later or get it from the library, it has to be in my possession.
The other aspect of this is that when I love a book, I want to own it completely. This is hard to explain, the nearest I can get is something I read once- a girl who copied out her favorite book because she wanted to own the words. Either you get it or you don’t. But this explains why I have the hard to ignore compulsion to buy multiple copies of my favorite books. The short of this is that I HAVE to own books that I love, and I love a lot of books.
So, the process of purging is difficult. However, today I hit the magic mood. I had made the goal to get rid of 30. As I have 5 bookcases with 6 shelves each, that only meant 1 book per shelf. I started, and about an hour later I had a pile of almost….100 books to get rid of. 100! That’s a heck of a lot. Of course my bookshelves still look the same, but I know there’s a difference.
The second thing I did was to post in my other blog- the blog that is referenced in the link to the right. I haven’t posted there in almost a year, and having that pointed out to me spurred me to action. I’ll be attempting to post there more regularly- we’ll see how that goes.
As you know, I completely understand. I actually still own at least three copies of Harlan Ellison’s The Deathbird Stories from when I was obsessed with it, and I bought every cover I found. If you have never read it, one of them is yours. 🙂
How about listing yourself as an Amazon associate, and posting your collection up for sale? You’ll be able to tell yourself you’re keeping all your books as “inventory,” and when you are forced to get rid of one, at least you’ll have a couple bucks consolation, and you’ll know the book is going to someone who really wants it!