nostalgicI love the feeling of them, the weight of them, the smell that you only get when you have a sufficient density of books in a room. I love the reality of them. I'm never going to be one of those people who makes the transition to electronic books, because they just aren't real enough for me. I say this as someone who writes books on a computer, and rarely, if ever prints them out before they hit the final draft; I realize it's not a rational way to be. It's just how I'm wired. It doesn't help that I'm an obsessive packrat who collects basically everything you can think of. When Pokemon was big, the core philosophy -- 'gotta catch 'em all' -- made total sense to me. I just chose to apply it to books.
All my life I've wandered through used bookstores, looking at the shelves and wondering how anyone could ever, ever let some of those volumes out of their hands. I've seriously theorized that certain books must have come from estate sales following the tragic deaths of their owners, because otherwise, how could they have wound up on that shelf? There's just no way the parting was voluntary. The knowledge that someday, my books will be on those shelves, books with my name on them, cast into the chilling world of the second-hand tome, just doesn't compute. Once you own a book, it's yours forever, right?
Right?
Recently, the rapidly shrinking floor space in my home has forced me to take a long, hard look at this philosophy, and admit that, perhaps, there are things in life more important than owning every book ever published by Leisure Horror. Like, y'know, being able to find my way to the bathroom. And not being one of those 'human interest' stories about the woman found a week after the big earthquake, smothered under the weight of her own toppled anthology collection. Also, I'm trying to raise money to go to WorldCon in Australia in 2010, and selling some of the books I have no intention of ever reading again seems like a good way to start. And I have books I'm never going to read again. I try to pretend that I don't, but I do. There are books I only get the urge to read every six or seven years, and that's one thing. There are reference books, and that's another thing. But works of fiction whose contents have long since ceased to appeal to me in any meaningful way? Yeah, those can go.
Getting rid of books is at once entirely alien to me and deeply cathartic. This book I didn't like? I'm not obligated to keep it. This book I liked just fine but haven't read since 1992, and wow, the idea of reading it now ceases to appeal after three pages? It can go. This book here that was the literary equivalent of a bad Science-Fiction Channel Original Movie? It was fun once, I'm not buying the DVD, the novelization can go. Suddenly, it's possible that I might be able to put the books I actually want back on the shelves. Suddenly, I can see the floor.
It's all very strange.
But kinda cool.
August 4 2008, 17:47:18 UTC 8 years ago
Which, er, I never have managed to give to the library or sell to a used bookstore. *facepalm*
August 4 2008, 18:29:22 UTC 8 years ago
But almost all of my books are there because I want to reread them. Not necessarily now, or even in a predictable time, but I know that sometime I will want to read "that book" and it will be OOP (and these days public libraries seem to not stock many OOP books, they don't have the storage space).
August 4 2008, 20:18:56 UTC 8 years ago
And you can't always count on once-popular authors [or even some still-popular authors backlist - frex, ever realize you were missing only one early Mercedes Lackey Valdamar 2nd-part-of-a-trilogy book and the library doesn't have it?! 'tis a truly maddening case of plotus interruptus] being on their shelves, either. Me, I collect John Dickson Carr, aka Carter Dickson, who was known as the master of the locked room mystery and often wrote 3-4 books a year during his heyday (1930s-1970s). A lot of his books were never issued in hardback and I still have several gaps that I fear may only be fillable by paperbacks so brittle I'd be afraid to read them. :(
August 4 2008, 18:40:11 UTC 8 years ago
But almost all of my books are there because I want to reread them. Not necessarily now, or even in a predictable time, but I know that sometime I will want to read "that book" and it will be OOP (and these days public libraries seem to not stock many OOP books, they don't have the storage space).