Wanting to Want Fewer Books

I have never been terribly discerning about the books I buy. I have always spent my book budget on whatever looks interesting, gathering a collection of books I might like to read some day. In my early adulthood, this method worked reasonably well for me. My book budget was small, so my collection grew at a fairly slow rate, and I was in grad school for English, so it made a certain amount of sense to snag books I knew I would have to read whenever I came across them, especially if it was on the cheap. But as the money available to buy books has increased and the books I will have to read has decreased with my circumstances (pretty much to zero), this method has become unwieldy and almost absurd. I now buy far more books in a year than I could read in the same time. For me, the point of owning books has never been solely to be able to read them, so I spent a few years unperturbed by my wacky ratio of books bought to books read, figuring that if we had the money and the space and if it brought me joy to acquire so many books, where was the harm?

I still think pretty much along those lines, except that we don't really have the space any more (there are only so many places you can put bookshelves in a house, alas), and almost more importantly, I no longer think it brings me joy to acquire so many books. I still love (*love*) a good browse and splurge in the bookstore, but it's become a bit like the way I love French fries: fully and genuinely in the moment, but not so much in the long term. I will never be able to read everything that's ever been written, and having so many unread books in the house is starting to feel more like a sad reminder of that fact than an abundance of reading riches. 

I've been hovering for a few years on the realization that I will have to alter my book-buying habits (or somehow score a Beauty-and-the-Beast-level library--and the kind of house palace that could hold it), but a recent development has made me want to. We have a spare room in our basement (I think of it as the lumber room, but I think we're in the wrong century for that to be entirely apt), and we recently cleared it out (again--I swear stuff multiples down there). We ordered a few more bookshelves to put in the cleared out space and to relieve some of our upstairs bookcases of their double-shelved burdens. I spent much of this past weekend reorganizing the shelves in the sunroom (my "office," where my desk, my couch, and most of my books are--and where I spend most of my waking hours) and hauling some two hundred books downstairs. The sunroom shelves are so much more open now. Don't get me wrong--there's no free space, no room to set a nice vase of flowers or a treasured tchotchke or anything. Some of the shelves still have a small "extra" stack of books sitting in front of the row or resting across the line of books. But none of the shelves are fully double-shelved anymore, and the crevices between bookcases are no longer stuffed with the odd books that just had no where else to go. And I like it. I like being able to see everything that's there. I like the little slivers of empty space. I like the tidiness of it, the sense of abundance coupled with control. I like that the books do not seem to be completely taking over the room. I like it so much that I want to keep it that way. And the only way to do that is to be discerning about which books come into the house from now on. (And more ruthless about which ones leave. But that is a topic for another day.)

I hear tell of readers who only keep the books that have special meaning to them. I never saw the appeal in that before, but I'm getting to a place where I can just about imagine it. It sounds freeing. And terrifying. Something to contemplate... another time, perhaps.