Book hoarders, when do you say stop? ;) Tough day for me…
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Book hoarders, when do you say stop? ;)
Tough day for me today; I’ve given away a few hundred books to the local library. I’m a minimalist, my friends joke that I live like a monk, except for the shelves on which I’ve been collecting books almost religiously for the last 15 years.
Many of them were cheap oldies in bad shape; I bought a lot of classics and sets preparing for a university career (didn’t make it in academia in the end though :D), and some completely random stuff only because *it might be helpful* someday. Yeah, Cellini’s autobiography, absolutely necessary, just like those intimate diaries of sexually repressed Victorians, and anthologies of badly translated poetry from countries I will never even visit…
They’ve started to invade my living space and finally I said enough. I squashed my sentimentality and said goodbye to many editions, even some I got as gifts or ones I had some history with (a copy of Pindar’s poetry I hunted down in a second-hand bookstore on the other side of the city, only to drop it into a puddle in massive rain an hour later lol; goodbye my love). I still have a soft spot for some old, outdated monographs, despite the fact no one’s going to quote from them anymore. They need to go though.
Will I actually be reading this in the next two years? Can I replace the old, stinking copy with an ebook? Can I, instead of keeping it because it might be useful for a quote one day, get it easily from the library? Unshakeable criteria.
My room got bigger and lighter without that 700-page-long French biography of Voltaire, which I’d never have read anyway, and a few hundred others.
Goodbye scholarly days; reading for pleasure, here I come! Seriously. I just ordered 8 new ones :D
#entertainment
source
Tough day for me today; I’ve given away a few hundred books to the local library. I’m a minimalist, my friends joke that I live like a monk, except for the shelves on which I’ve been collecting books almost religiously for the last 15 years.
Many of them were cheap oldies in bad shape; I bought a lot of classics and sets preparing for a university career (didn’t make it in academia in the end though :D), and some completely random stuff only because *it might be helpful* someday. Yeah, Cellini’s autobiography, absolutely necessary, just like those intimate diaries of sexually repressed Victorians, and anthologies of badly translated poetry from countries I will never even visit…
They’ve started to invade my living space and finally I said enough. I squashed my sentimentality and said goodbye to many editions, even some I got as gifts or ones I had some history with (a copy of Pindar’s poetry I hunted down in a second-hand bookstore on the other side of the city, only to drop it into a puddle in massive rain an hour later lol; goodbye my love). I still have a soft spot for some old, outdated monographs, despite the fact no one’s going to quote from them anymore. They need to go though.
Will I actually be reading this in the next two years? Can I replace the old, stinking copy with an ebook? Can I, instead of keeping it because it might be useful for a quote one day, get it easily from the library? Unshakeable criteria.
My room got bigger and lighter without that 700-page-long French biography of Voltaire, which I’d never have read anyway, and a few hundred others.
Goodbye scholarly days; reading for pleasure, here I come! Seriously. I just ordered 8 new ones :D
#entertainment
source
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