Reader's Dilemma

I am deeply ambivalent about getting rid of books. In a recent post, Nick cited a survey that showed the average British household owned 138 books. I couldn't find a similar statistic for American households, but did find a study showing a very strong correlation between number of books in a household and the children's subsequent level of education. I grew up in a house with loaded books shelves, sometimes two-deep for smaller fiction books. We had the row of Encyclopedia Britannica for reference along with atlases, dictionaries and thesauruses. And yes, that's plural because once a book entered the house, it never left. I was always a voracious reader. For every book we read in my fifth grade class, we got a construction paper train car added to the engine with our name on it up on the classroom wall. Most people had several boxcars following their engine. My train chugged all the way around the room, circling back on itself. I once nearly caught the house on fire reading after I was supposed to be asleep. I had draped my bathrobe and a folded towel over the groovy plastic mushroom lamp in my '70's bedroom, and it went up in flames, burning through the fabric and melting the lamp. After that, I'd lie on the floor, reading by the bit of hallway light that came in through the crack under the door. Even in high school, I would read as I walked down the hall, and I often had a book hidden under my desk to read during class. All this to say, I love books.

And yet... clutter. I do hate clutter. With the advent of easily accessible information on the web, owning books doesn't mean to me what it used to. I have a dictionary/thesaurus right on the desktop of my computer. I have Google Earth to serve as an atlas. My kids sure don't go to an encyclopedia for reference, they log  on. I have discovered that not only can I carry as many books as I want to in the tiny space of an iPad, I can also enlarge the font and not fool with reading glasses. Win-win. I know the purists are writhing and shouting, "It's not the same!" Well, of course it isn't. Typing on a computer isn't the same as putting pen to paper, but we bloggers all do it. And there are times where I enjoy curling up with an actual book, rummaging through the sale rack at a bookstore or finding something new at the library.   just don't know that I need to keep a million books around. So they've been heading out the door by the box-load, bound for the local library's book sale. My most recent culling is the set up top, waiting to be boxed.

In the interests of full disclosure, I do have 50 or 60 books at work, all related to my job. Books on psychotherapy and psychological theory and books on issues that come up in the context of therapy, like mindfulness, relationships, sexuality, finances, substance abuse, grief and health. I imagine that when I retire, most of those will be sent packing.

Over the last month, I have ousted literally hundreds of books. And that was after an equally big purge a couple of years ago. I counted and was stoked to find that I was down to 99 books at home. Some I hold on to for sentimental reasons - books from my adolescence that I actually do re-read on occasion and my favorite children's books, which bring back happy memories of cuddling the kids on my laps and reading them over and over again. There are also the sort of reference books that can't be easily replaced by the internet - books on gardening and local hikes, for instance. The rest are books I either haven't gotten to yet but definitely will and books I know I'll re-read. After some gloating about bringing the book total to under 100, I remembered that I'd already packed away half a dozen books on Buddhism. Well. It's a work in progress.