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"There is no end to the making of books and much reading is a weariness of the flesh"
Many years ago a friend was moving apartments- this was in the days when people moved every year or two: ah, Youth! Her Czechoslovakian boyfriend- this was in the days when there was a Czechoslovakia, so you know we're going back here- looked at the thirty odd boxes of books and said morosely, "This is the dark side of literacy."
All those people who say 'I never throw books out' or 'Oh no I could never throw a book away no matter how battered it is.' Those people? They haven't been buying books for 40 years and they haven't spent a good chunk of their inheritance on impulse book buying and they especially have not had someone wish ten UPS boxes of manga on them. I have. I did. The results are not pretty.
When I came home from Japan the first thing I did- instinctive grief management- was to impose some order on all my books, which meant taking them from the seven rooms they were scattered through and culling sheep from goats and putting them back on the various bookshelves by category. The goats- the books I wasn't going to read immediately or read again soon or possibly read ever but they might come in handy some day (two thick volumes of Recent Japanese Stage Design? Sources of the Meiji Constitution? Musashi in hardcover?) went into boxes and the boxes went down to the basement where my kind tenants had erected open Ikea shelves to put them on. In the basement already were a box of my grandfather's 1890's French books (the rest, I later discovered, were in the garage where the mice ate them, so at least they served some purpose), my parents' 78 records, and a bunch of ancient family photo albums and scrapbooks from my childhood.
And all was well, and all was well, and all was very very well. At least on the book front. Grief management then inspired me to start lifting linoleum, but that's another story.
Ten and a half years later I'm looking for a particular book that memory says is in the basement. I go through box after box after box, not all of which have slept undisturbed through the years. It isn't there. I go to look at the upstairs bookshelves just in case I left it there. I have a genetic weakness called Johnson Spot Blindness that allows me to look right at the object in question and not see it. So I have to visualize the book as close as I can and then mentally read the titles of books in that range as I'm looking. The book I remember to be a hardcover and not too thick. I read the book titles on the four book cases in my study (east asian everything), the two boxes of books in the corner (mistakenly thought to contain papers), the two bookcases in the middle room (biography and varia), downstairs in the front room (history and goat-manga), the kitchen catch-all bookcase (fat genre paperbacks and unread hardcovers) and even in the bedroom where nonfiction is supposedly not allowed (grammar books excepted.)
I can't find it, and I can't find his other book, so I suppose there's another box somewhere else where there are yet more books, and right now I'm feeling a vague horror and claustrophobia over the sheer numbers. Times like this I think the Buddha was right: possessions weigh the soul. I want half those books out of here and there's nowhere to take them. (Don't suggest bookmooch. I've checked a random sample of what I have against bookmooch and no one wants what I own. Besides, bookmooch is a trade and I don't *want* more books. I want *fewer.*)
I can live with Japanese stage design in my basement. You never know when something like that will come in handy. But I'm starting to wonder if I really need Witchworld on my bedroom shelves, or an analysis of 19th century popular French culture in my living room. Will I ever read Norton again, or the French ever? My reread history hasn't been happy, and the stuff that pleased me in the early 80's has signally failed to live up to the memory. Besides, those early Daw books age badly- paper brittle, binding glue dried out. No second-hand store will buy them; it's a question how long they'll survive as is. Much less will they buy odd fantasy collections from the 70's and 80's with a winner or so and a lot of duds. (Read a couple of those last night. Gave me a vague oppression of soul. 90% of everything is crap, yes.)
We won't even talk about the manga. I have them, there's nowhere to get rid of them, end story. I envision an enormous river of paperbacks, broad as the Ganges, running through the world; and like any river, carrying great wracks of garbage and human waste on its flood. I suppose I can stick some of my dreck acquisitions out for the paper recycle, to be put to some kind of good use. But the rest sit here, weighing my soul; and bonfires, alas, are forbidden in the city. Hell, I don't even have a fireplace.
All those people who say 'I never throw books out' or 'Oh no I could never throw a book away no matter how battered it is.' Those people? They haven't been buying books for 40 years and they haven't spent a good chunk of their inheritance on impulse book buying and they especially have not had someone wish ten UPS boxes of manga on them. I have. I did. The results are not pretty.
When I came home from Japan the first thing I did- instinctive grief management- was to impose some order on all my books, which meant taking them from the seven rooms they were scattered through and culling sheep from goats and putting them back on the various bookshelves by category. The goats- the books I wasn't going to read immediately or read again soon or possibly read ever but they might come in handy some day (two thick volumes of Recent Japanese Stage Design? Sources of the Meiji Constitution? Musashi in hardcover?) went into boxes and the boxes went down to the basement where my kind tenants had erected open Ikea shelves to put them on. In the basement already were a box of my grandfather's 1890's French books (the rest, I later discovered, were in the garage where the mice ate them, so at least they served some purpose), my parents' 78 records, and a bunch of ancient family photo albums and scrapbooks from my childhood.
And all was well, and all was well, and all was very very well. At least on the book front. Grief management then inspired me to start lifting linoleum, but that's another story.
Ten and a half years later I'm looking for a particular book that memory says is in the basement. I go through box after box after box, not all of which have slept undisturbed through the years. It isn't there. I go to look at the upstairs bookshelves just in case I left it there. I have a genetic weakness called Johnson Spot Blindness that allows me to look right at the object in question and not see it. So I have to visualize the book as close as I can and then mentally read the titles of books in that range as I'm looking. The book I remember to be a hardcover and not too thick. I read the book titles on the four book cases in my study (east asian everything), the two boxes of books in the corner (mistakenly thought to contain papers), the two bookcases in the middle room (biography and varia), downstairs in the front room (history and goat-manga), the kitchen catch-all bookcase (fat genre paperbacks and unread hardcovers) and even in the bedroom where nonfiction is supposedly not allowed (grammar books excepted.)
I can't find it, and I can't find his other book, so I suppose there's another box somewhere else where there are yet more books, and right now I'm feeling a vague horror and claustrophobia over the sheer numbers. Times like this I think the Buddha was right: possessions weigh the soul. I want half those books out of here and there's nowhere to take them. (Don't suggest bookmooch. I've checked a random sample of what I have against bookmooch and no one wants what I own. Besides, bookmooch is a trade and I don't *want* more books. I want *fewer.*)
I can live with Japanese stage design in my basement. You never know when something like that will come in handy. But I'm starting to wonder if I really need Witchworld on my bedroom shelves, or an analysis of 19th century popular French culture in my living room. Will I ever read Norton again, or the French ever? My reread history hasn't been happy, and the stuff that pleased me in the early 80's has signally failed to live up to the memory. Besides, those early Daw books age badly- paper brittle, binding glue dried out. No second-hand store will buy them; it's a question how long they'll survive as is. Much less will they buy odd fantasy collections from the 70's and 80's with a winner or so and a lot of duds. (Read a couple of those last night. Gave me a vague oppression of soul. 90% of everything is crap, yes.)
We won't even talk about the manga. I have them, there's nowhere to get rid of them, end story. I envision an enormous river of paperbacks, broad as the Ganges, running through the world; and like any river, carrying great wracks of garbage and human waste on its flood. I suppose I can stick some of my dreck acquisitions out for the paper recycle, to be put to some kind of good use. But the rest sit here, weighing my soul; and bonfires, alas, are forbidden in the city. Hell, I don't even have a fireplace.
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Er, I realise this isn't much use to you. But I do understand the feeling. If not quite to the same degree.
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*_* See, something like that I'd adopt from you in a heartbeat!
(Mostly because I have a script I'm working on that deals with the latter part of that century. Not that a boy's love, romantic horror [very little gore] needs to be terribly accurate I suppose?)
I've told myself no more books until I've got more shelves... *laughs at self* This vacation I'm pruning and putting books up for grab; and as C. has a job for a bit now I'm also splurging on more shelves. =p
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Or you could cart things over to the local library, who will most likely sort through them and discard anything they can't use and put most of the rest into their book sale.
I beleive thsoe who say they could never get rid of a book are thsoe who read, like, five books a year, if that. The only way I can control my book collection is by getting rid of large boxes of them at a time.
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I'd go for the local-library option myself, if that's available.
books
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I sometimes think that I should just put them in boxes and give them to a library. Can you do that? I know that some are ready for recycling but the ones that are not, maybe a donation is in order?
*huggles* Good luck!
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But it's good to have a dream isn't it?
Hubby's parent had an fire in their attic a couple of years ago and water damage solved half the problem for us! ^__^
Again not very useful for you! just adding my story along with others. can't you convert some youngsters to reading more and saying to them here this is a good one! I'm not suggesting you hand your books out to preschoolers...how about their mothers or colleagues.
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LOL! Some of them have! I married in to one of those families. I've been steadily getting rid of books ever since.
If you take off color pages and covers, books shred into compost quite nicely ... if you have any gardener friends?
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But everyone I know already has all the books they want to read, and few of them have any interest in the sources of the Meiji constitution or Hiroshige's pictures of fishes.
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Actually half the fun for me is forgetting I have books and getting to read them again, or read them period. Because the fun of buying books is the buying; the reading part is work.
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The part that isn't working yet is LT internal search and matching on UTF8 characters. So no social network, no author or work pages, etc. And on occasion weird things will get combined by accident, like Russian and Japanese texts, but that's uncombine-able.
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But the social/sharing aspect -- where it tells you which/how many other users have that same book -- doesn't function very well for unicode entries. So, sure, that's interesting trivia and all, but I'm mainly interested in keeping track of what's on my shelves for my own purposes.
Anyhoo, you can enter up to 200 books for free by way of trying it out. (But it ought to be properly labeled as an 'addictive site'.)
I go on nutty book grabbing binges, which don't correspond to the nutty book reading binges. Then I go for months w/o even glancing at one. There is no rhyme or reason here.
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It must be the pirate(paternal) side of me. The side from Boyan which coincidentally has Dutch in it. The maternal Javanese side has Chinese blood in it. Five generations down it is all very diluted now though.
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Mhh yeah- it's interesting to see what someone else has but I doubt I'd be interested in finding where the overlap is.
The book-grab binges have slowed a little since I realized I only read maybe 2/3 of the books I buy. Book-off in NY used to be good for 'grab because it looks fun', but last time was a disappointment and, well, amazon.jp has exactly what I want and so far hasn't sent any shipments via Alaska.
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As for the other languages, you can pick from different sources. Um, for instance, in English you can search in a variety of libraries, including the U.S. Library of Congress. My personal persnickety note would be that even the LOC can be wrong, wrong, wrong -- as when I have the book right in front of me, and I can see the wrongness. So no computer database is perfect, your mileage may vary, etc.
Mhh yeah- it's interesting to see what someone else has but I doubt I'd be interested in finding where the overlap is.
I've found myself weirdly fascinated by the statistics page, the section that tell you when only ONE other user has a book. And it changes over time . . .
Thing is, I don't tend to be much of an impulse new book buyer. I make certain decisions about what I want to read in advance; then I'll get them in swell foops if I hit a sale (bingeing). Used book sales like library sales . . . well, okay, those are a slightly different matter. Yeep. But still, I don't really get that adventurous -- it's mainly things I recognize as a book or author or subject I'd already been interested in reading.