Not just wallpaper
But what if you identify as someone who doesn’t know when she might want to re-read or browse or look for something in this book and this one and this one?
Some people treat books like totemic, magical objects. I know, I was one. About 10 years ago, my (divorced) parents moved house at around the same time, and gifted me a number of books about which they presumed I might feel sentimental, but which became a sort of albatross in my relationship. When I moved in with my husband, he had very few books, not because he is not a reader, but because he grew up in a Buddhist household, prefers an uncluttered environment and places little value on physical objects. Once he has read a book, he simply donates it or gives it away, and holds on only to the ones he is sure he will reread.
Bully for him, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to do the same. You can want to re-read a book you didn’t know you were going to want to re-read until this minute. You can want to browse a book. You can like having favorite books present in case you want to re-read or browse them. And here’s the thing about having a lot of books: they will still be there to give away when you move on to the library in the sky. You don’t have to give them away now because someone else can give them away later.
I was thinking about him the other day when I saw an internet discussion about a man who told a bookshop employee that he only owns one book at a time, buying a new one when he has read the last one and got rid of it. “The horror! How could he? I simply couldn’t!” people wrote, leading me to reflect yet again on that contemporary tendency to treat having books as a sort of identity.
That’s not necessarily what it is though. Here’s the thing about books: you can’t absorb them by reading them once and never again. If it’s a bit of fluff, that doesn’t matter much, but not all books are bits of fluff. (I hope I don’t need to present evidence for this? I think it’s rather obvious?) Take Hamlet for instance – as a book it’s a slender thing, but you can’t just whip through it and put it in the nearest Little Free Library and get all there is to get out of it. History, philosophy, law – books in those fields can’t just be gulped down like a glass of lemonade.
Sure, no doubt people can be pretentious and smug about having a lot of books, but that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to have a lot of books.
Yeah, I have quite a few books. I know whenever I want to look something up, I can go back to the book and look it up. Of course, so many people are looking things up online, they don’t understand that, but for those of us who like having a real, material book, it matters.
People who go around dismissing other people’s habits so breezily often come across as pretentious and smug, more so than those people who have books to “look smart”.
My ex didn’t like having books around. He didn’t read, but he also thought they spoiled a decor. So when I wanted to read, I had to kneel down and pull open the bottom drawer where he stashed all my books. Not easy at the best of times….try when you’re 9 months pregnant!
I grew up poor; the only thing we had was books. Dad picked them up cheap from a lot of places. Having books was my one release from poverty…and I loved (and still love) to read.
I admit to having too many books. I had loads of them in my office, but then I retired, and they all had to come home. But I don’t have enough walls to put them all on shelves, and now many of them languish in boxes where I can’t get at them without major effort. I’ll either have to get a bigger house, or get rid of a whole lot of books. I don’t much enjoy either prospect.
Last time I counted (about 4 years ago) our home library had about 5500 volumes -shelved, stacked, piled, tucked – you name it. The primary library isn’t in the ‘public part’ of our house so most visitors can’t see it. I use e-readers when traveling but for a relaxing read, I love the feel and smell of a book. About half are fiction. I’m not above writing in them to capture a thought or reaction to a passage, but I try to limit that to note cards we clip to the books. Many times one of us has gone to the shelves to pull something in support of an argument (or to win one). The only books we’ve kept are the ones at least one of us has re-read or used as a ready reference. As for much of the online information sources, many are about as useful, unbiased or reliable as twitter is for news. If you want to examine what an author said, look it up in the original. We do lend books but I know where they all are ;).
My wife and I have a fairly large collection of books, many of which are in a full wall bookshelf. I like having them there. I don’t think there is much chance that I’ll reread more than a couple of books, as I almost never reread a book, but I couldn’t get rid of them, not without great anguish. There are a few I was thinking of junking: old computer programming instruction books for now-obsolete tools I never used, books I never read and for which I now have neither need nor interest. But most of them, no way.
My wife has much less tolerance for clutter than me, but we both love books, so most of ours are in the bookcases we installed in the basement (where clutter is mostly out of sight). I have a tendency to pick up books that are being given away with the idea that I’ll read them some day, so I still have quite a few unread down there, but I’m resolved to catch up.
And I still mourn some of the books that I lost somewhere in all my moving over the years.
Another thing about keeping lots of books around–I came from a family of (mostly) readers, and there were always tons of books in our house, so there was always something interesting to read. Including a few popular books on linguistics, which eventually led to me choosing my major in college.
I was hoping that would work with our kids, but while our daughter is a bit of a reader, it didn’t stick with our son.
I grew up in a house in which my mother was an avid reader of novels and history. I am writing this inside my own present library, which is two rooms converted into one, with bookshelves covering three of its four walls. The books are mainly reference and history, with a few novels and poetry books sprinkled in to leaven the lot. Also, one book on fine woodworking, as I got so sick and tired of rummaging through stacks of books that I did a fine woodworking course under a master craftsman and went on to build the shelving that now accomodates them all..
Very few of my books have I bought new. I like browsing through secondhand bookshops, now sadly doing it tough thanks to the Internet, Google books, etc.
The bookcases include 70 shelves, each containing ~30 books, and also a fair few DVDs, likewise bought secondhand after one play by their previous owner in the wake of Netflix etc.
Still a fair way to go in order to catch up with Pliny.
Ohhhh man…
We moved about 10 years ago. I had all these books on shelves in the basement, and I thought, we’re moving, I should have fewer things, lighten my load, etc. I looked at my books, and I thought, I’m never going to reread my hard-cover 1980s sci-fi novels. They’re big, heavy, somewhat dated; I tossed them. And then I thought, I’m never going to reread any of my fiction (I rarely do). I tossed it all. And then I thought, I’m never going to reread any of my non-fiction, either. When I went though it, I was dismayed by how much of my non-fiction was obsolete. Not false, but made irrelevant by time. In the end, I tossed everything that I had read, which was about half the entire collection.
Everything I hadn’t read I packed up in boxes and moved to the new house. I didn’t have a place to put it in the new house, so it sat there in boxes for 4 years until we moved again. I didn’t have a place for it in the new new house either, so it stayed in boxes for a couple more years.
Then one day I was in the basement, and there is an alcove in the basement, and I looked at that alcove and I thought, *I* *see* *book* (shelves). It took a while, but I built the shelves, and I unboxed my books, and I put them on the shelves…and the shelves were only half full.
I stood there looking at all the empty shelves feeling deflated and wishing I hadn’t tossed the other half of my books.
I still wish I hadn’t.
It’s hard. I’m always thinning out my books but I’m also always thickening them, so progress in actually making space on the shelves is glacially slow. I’ll take a backpack load of books to a Little Library but then find the same number or more that I take home. The struggle is real!
We just recently participated in the city garage sale; we both thinned out our books (my husband more than me). We hauled all those books downtown. Very few sold – mostly some of his history books and a couple of celebrity biographies. None of mine sold. I guess I don’t read the same things as the other people in town. So we hauled most of them back again, though I sent a few off to the local thrift store. Let them figure out what to do with them.
My husband has a vinyl collection that’s almost as large as our book collection; we probably sold nearly 200 of those. Our table had a constant line of people, but they were all looking at the vinyl not the books.
I’ve always wanted one of those libraries like you see in movies, where there are all sorts of shelves, so many you have to use a moving ladder to get to them.
I like reading. I got into it when I was a kid. It probably helped that it was something I could do when my allergies were bothering me and interfered with breathing. (I could breathe well enough for taking it easy, but not well enough for running around and playing.)
I don’t have nearly as many books as some people here have. I live in an apartment, so I have limited space for them. The majority of my books are fiction – science fiction and fantasy (SF&F). The nonfiction include textbooks, reference books, essay collections. Periodically, I have given away books from my SF&F collection. I donated them to charity auctions at science fiction conventions.
A subset of my books are my permanent collection. Some I want to read again. Some are autographed by the author. Some were my dad’s. I’ll let the relatives decide what to do with them when I die. One of the books my brother has called dibs on.:-) It’s a copy of the Star Wars novel printed before the movie was released.
Karen, I’m more in your camp (and a former chemist!). I probably have under 1000 books, with a heavy base to SF, but also history, reference, novels and even a book of poetry somewhere… I’d love one of those huge multilevel libraries with the moving ladders, but that’s just not going to happen. We don’t even have wall space for another bookcase. I can say with certainty that I’ve read every book currently in my bookcase at least 3x and some of them maybe 6 or 7. Live long enough and between a fading memory and deeper insight there is always something new to get out of a good book.
The only books I get rid of are those that I really didn’t enjoy, or pulp purchased in desperation at an airport to fill in a flight.
This is like saying, “You want to listen to Beethoven’s 9th symphony more than once? Whatever for? You’re done, move on, art doesn’t get better the second time around!”
I just read the article. There is a note at the bottom that says the headline was changed to give more emphasis to the central argument. The headline currently reads: “Reading is precious – which is why I’ve been giving away my books”.
I don’t really have a disagreement with the article. Some people, sometimes, do treat book ownership as a magical totem that makes you “know things”, but of course “knowing things” only comes from reading and absorbing the books, not owning them. I don’t think she’s arguing at all against having a lot of books, she’s just saying there are some pretentious reasons for doing so, and some societal and personal benefits that can accrue from giving books away to people who might like to read them.
I am certain that I have books I purchased for a reason other than actually wanting to read them. There are lots of books I want to have read but I don’t want to go through the process of reading. Some of those books I purchased, figuring I might force myself to slog through them sometime, but I never did, and now I just don’t want to. So, to some degree, I see myself in her description.
Ironically, one such book is Marie Kondo’s book Spark Joy.
I have to admit I have destroyed my attention span by my addiction to YouTube* and arguing online. It’s terrible but true. But I still have too many books! And this is AFTER selling and donating dozens and dozens when I self-imploded a decade or so ago. I’m just a renter now in a house I share with my very nice landlady, so the books are stacked in my room and the garage. Maybe I consider them totems, not of any erudition on my part, but…I can’t seem to even consider culling them further.
Non fiction/politics is mostly online for me. But I have a TON of architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture books. Some history. Some physics :) (I have a bound set of A Brief History of Time) I went through a rather manic collecting phase 20 years or so ago, so I have a lot. AND, I have a lot of science fiction. So I am not nearly as educated, well read, or erudite as many here.
* In my defense, at least I don;’t watch a lot of television!