The Awful Magic of Paring Down Your Book Collection

I am not a wealthy man.

This means, among other money-related things, that I do not live in a big house with a massive library, with books that can only be reached by sliding ladders and big comfy chairs in which to read them. I am a man with limited space, and it was high time I did something about reclaiming some of it from myself. After all, regaining land is in my blood; just ask the North Sea how the Dutch go at taking what's theirs.

Now, this comes right after Christmas, my birthday, and a sort-of kind-of book-buying binge late in December, so my work is cut out for me. I need motivation. The infamous Marie Kondo seems to know the score. Kondo is about as ruthless as they come, a professional tidier and author who claims to own only 30 books, some of which probably aren't even her own (her most famous is The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, currently cluttering up more than 2 million bookshelves around the world). Reading interviews with her and reviews of her book, you get the sense Marie Kondo isn't so much a professional with a unorthodox job as she is the leader of a cult. To her, clutter is an affliction, and she professes to be something akin to the cure. She is the Bane to my bookshelves' Gotham.

"Surrounded by the things I love." "Putting my life in order by putting my things in order." Kondo's messages seem pretty good, and I think I can aspire to them. Stuff is just stuff, right? You're conned by market forces and societal pressure into thinking you need a certain amount to fit in with the Western lifestyle, so you place attachments on things. And if tidying up by losing these attachments is a magical art, then it's something I am born with. If Harry Potter has taught me anything, it's that a book in and of itself can't teach you magic. You are born with or without it, you're a wizard or a Muggle. I need to find out which one I am, because Lord knows a half-giant in a motorcycle isn't coming to cart me off to the Hogwarts School of Getting Rid of Shit.

If you look at my collection, you'll notice it isn't exactly huge. I'm sure many reading this have far larger collections, and given the one-upmanship common in nerds, will cast aspersions on mine not being big ENOUGH, let alone something that needs cutting down. But I am a man who lives in an apartment where the ceiling fan is a constant threat to my brain function. I'll have to move this July, and books are heavy.

A collage of books (note: that is not Nazi propaganda in the middle picture)

A book collection is harder to scale down because of what the book means. The book is, to many people, a fetishized object. Not just certain books, like a good book you enjoyed, but the book in general. A collection of words put on pages and bound together. Neil Gaiman believes books have genders and that books are sacred. Makes sense: they have their own personalities, their own ideas - they are, at the very least, the most valuable by-product of other people's minds. 

I'm inclined towards Gaiman's position, because I love books, but only inclined, which makes me susceptible to other reasoning. And so comes to the process of tidying. I'll need to discover that magic within me, and so to make the process easier, I broke down potential goners into four categories:

1. Books I don't need
2. Books I won't ever read again / won't ever get to
3. Books in garbage condition
4. Books I don't like 

The first category could take care of everything. If I can mercilessly send everything I don't need to the book gulag, then who cares about the rest of the categories?

So then: what constitutes need? I assume I only really need what Abraham Maslow tells me I need in his neat little pyramid; I'm not smart enough to break into some high-minded original idea of what need is. If books don't fit somewhere in the hierarchy of needs, then out they go.

The powerful grain storage building of needs

Breaking it down: books don't constitute a physiological need, because they are very low in essential vitamins and minerals; they might not meet my safety needs, except for maybe a large, heavy one for protection; they don't really increase my feeling of love and belonging, even though many do feel a bit like family. On the face of it, that seems stupid.

Esteem works; I do take some pride in my book collection, and the knowledge therein helps me feel free and self-confident. I like discussing books with fellow book lovers, and yes, there's some showing off, can't deny really that. And owning certain books does help me feel self-actualized, in that being a book person forms part of my identity! So there is an establishment of need: I don't need books to live or survive, but I do need them to thrive and be the kind of person I want to be.

So I won't be tossing out all my books. Relieving. But this ruthless thing won't be very easy.

But do they need to be physical? Maybe I don't need books, but what's in the books. I own a lot of the classics, only some of which I have read more than once. The thing with classics is, all of these books one could get at a local library or for a buck at a used bookstore, pretty much whenever one wanted, whenever one has the urge to reread them. And many of them are now in the public domain. I could just go ahead and store all the classics I would like to read later in life on a digital reader and save myself some shelf space. Out goes Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and I've got some more shelf space!

To answer the previous paragraph's introductory question: yes. I made a short-sighted Kindle purchase a year or two ago, and I still have never completed a novel on it. This means there's another need involved, in that I need a physical copy of the book in my hands to actually read. I like the book as an object. I like seeing the progress physically, not represented as a percentage. I also like lugging them around, and the feeling of accomplishment when you've read an extra-super long one. It's like a trophy - Captain Ahab may never have reined in Moby-Dick, but it's like I've got him stuffed and sitting in my living room. Besides, I love the covers. I have a real weakness for Penguin editions. Look at them, they're beautiful!

A fuzzy photo of some of them

And though there's no real need to keep the ubiquitous classics, it'll be strange to want to read Jane Eyre again and then have to go out of my way to get a hold of a copy. Having them around makes me more inclined to reread them, too, and these are books that demand more than one go. 

And so Moby-Dick et al stay. Even if I won't reread them any time soon, it's almost guaranteed I will in the future.

This brings us to the second category: books I won't ever read again, or books I won't ever read in the first place. This one could also take care of things neatly. "Look at your bookshelves, Kondo decrees in her most emotionally fraught chapter, and accept that all those books you haven't read yet are books you will never read," says Laura Miller in her Slate review of Kondo's book. Having a penchant for lists that will lay unfinished as soon as my brain moves on to something else, I have a list of books in order of what I'll be reading for the next year. This could be a good way to see what to save. But if a book is not on that list, and I've read it before, and I can truly, deeply be cruel and admit I won't read it ever, well, what's the real point in keeping it?

And do I really need a 900 page biography of George Washington? A complete history of English-speaking peoples by Winston Churchill? A 1100-page book about New York City? C'mon. Put together, I've read maybe 20 pages of all of these. These will only impede my goal of becoming calm and living a simple life. My failure to read these books will only clutter up my life. Marie Kondo would toss them in a heartbeat.

Let's be honest: buying books is a disease. It's almost pathological. You can rationalize every purchase ten different ways in your mind, even more when you're low on funds. The feeling associated with buying a book is almost as great as the feeling of finishing a book. You see the same excuses used by record collectors, too, so maybe there's a beauty in holding onto something that is competing with technology and ultimately losing. Problem is, records are only a tiny fraction as thick as books.

So yes, I hoard books, but most of what I hoard is nonfiction, which have a definite edge on fiction as a kind of book to keep. It's not like you can actually store every bit of information found within thick nonfiction books in your head. With fiction, you just remember the gist of the storyline, themes that resonated with you, passages you liked, your favourite characters, simple things. Take down some notes if you don't want to write in the margins, and you're good to go. Reading a book about World War II means you've got to remember a hundred different dates, battles, and generals, in order to make sense of this world-defining event in history. So keeping the book about WWII makes more sense, because it can serve as reference. And who knows where I'll be at? Gigantic biographies take time to soak in; you can't just dash off 900 pages of Thomas Jefferson's life in an afternoon. Get real. 

Besides, Roger Ebert said it best: books do furnish a life. "You just never know. One day I may -- need is the word I use -- to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed." It's possible, and best to hold out for the future. 

So I've decided to keep Washington and Churchill et al. What's next?

Moby-Dick, we've decided is staying, but it deserves a spot for more than just that I like to hold on to it as a trophy. Apart from a cracked spine, it is in immaculate condition. I read it every day after work for a while, so it probably never left my home. And then there's my copy of East of Eden. It's battered from being carried around in my backpack, every time I open it another piece of the cover falls off, it's not really all that special - no super special cover, I didn't receive it as a gift, it's not signed by Steinbeck himself. I actually bought it at Value Village. It's about as common an edition of the book as one could find.

I could get rid of the ratty books now, and when the urge to read them again struck me, I could pick up a new, slick-looking edition! Saves me space in the meantime, and I'll be building a new and improved library when I've got a larger pad.

It's a nice idea, but here's where Gaiman's ideas start making sense. This admittedly crappy-looking book is the edition I read. East of Eden is my favourite book of all time. It's sprawling, gorgeously written, and dives deep into faith, class, and meaning in religion at a time when I was doing the same. It was a novel I needed. I could never part with the copy that revealed to me so much wisdom.

And that's why I want to continue owning books, and what makes paring down the library so difficult. I don't agree with Neil Gaiman about the book being a sacred object, though the degree to which I disagree makes the disagreement pointless. I don't think all books are sacred; I think my books are sacred. Books become something special once you've released the story. The act of reading, and what it can do for you, is the special part. A book is a book until you've read it. Then it becomes a part of you. Or, if you hate it, it's just another book, but it still fills you with some sort of understanding. A local chain bookstore could burn down, and it would be awful, but I'd still be less broken up about it than if my childhood collection of beat-up Calvin and Hobbes books was destroyed.

So East of Eden, and all like it, stay.

So I've determined to keep books I actually like. Bully for me. What about books I hate? I read a lot within certain parameters, so I did or will enjoy most of what I own (something I might want to work on). But two books I recently read stand out as rather unpleasant experiences: The Martian by Andy Weir and Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee. The former was unexpectedly disliked: it's hyped as one of the best science fiction books in recent memory, touted as funny and interesting and did I mention it's funny? I mostly hated it, the method of storytelling only undercutting the tension, and it was not nearly as hilarious as it's said to be. The less said about ...Watchman the better. So should they stay?

Should a personal library be uniformly books you enjoyed or would enjoy? Probably not. Mark Twain hated Jane Austen, but when he starts the famous quote with, "Whenever I take up Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility..."* you know he's still reading them, probably from his own collection. 

But Mark Twain was super wealthy. He had the space to keep all those wretched Jane Austen novels! Maybe in the future, when space in not a limited commodity, I can indeed hold on to books I actively disliked. But for now, The Martian and those similar to it can go. Given how well-liked the book is, it might find a great home.  

Twain's personal library (via ShortList)

So in the end, I could only bear to part with things I already have no positive connection to. While that's progress, I don't think it's much in the way of decluttering. I'm sorry, Marie, I'm just a Muggle. Reading your lessons through cursory Internet research did not convince me to be as ruthless as you are said to be. I am still a sad sack who fills his inanimate objects with meaning. I could never be as cruel as you.

I don't think you'd mind, really. I have failed, but my house "won't blow up." You'd think me silly, but you'd forgive my insolence.

Let's hope my back will forgive me come July.





* Full quote: 

Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along. ...

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.