Deciding which books to part with

My condo will be repainted next month. The painter asked me to empty the bookcases so that he can move them easily. How many books three bookcases can hold has surprised me. The living room is cluttered with 20 filled-to-the-brim brown grocery bags. If the painter is going to be able to move around, I need to let go of a good many books.

Why do we hold on to books we’ve never opened? In a previous post about decluttering, I wrote that I keep books so that visitors would know that a reader lives here. The irony is that someone examining my bookshelves would never guess my taste in reading. I’m mostly a fiction reader, but over the years I’ve given away almost all of the novels I ever owned. Only a dozen novels are left here, and half of them are by Jane Austen, the only author I’m sure to reread. The nonfiction collection contains mostly reference volumes, not books to read from cover to cover.

So, if my bookshelves are supposed to be a personal reflection of me, they’re not doing their job. But what does it matter, what impression my bookshelves give? Only if intellectual snobbery were my thing. Besides, most of the people who come here are friends who know that I read.

As I culled through the bookshelves, unfulfilled reading aspirations stared me in the face. There were anthologies of literature, expository prose, and classics of philosophy; spiritual memoirs; volumes about US history and art history; and self-help books. There was a whole shelf of editing and writing books that I thought might be helpful on my job but rarely consulted. 

Not everyone agrees that unopened books should be discarded. They are “imagined reading futures, not an indication of failure,” says an online article that advocates for keeping them. I’m not feeling like a failure; I didn’t stop reading books, I just read ones from the library instead of from my shelves. I can no longer imagine reading any of the books that are destined for donation.

If I have regrets about not reading these books, they aren’t about wasting money. Most were bought used. In the 1990s, when I lived in Edgewater, the Friends of the Edgewater Library held used book sales with ridiculously low prices. I would go crazy, grabbing up hardcovers for 50 cents and paperbacks for a quarter. What little I paid went to a good cause.

In the recent purge, I thought that I was being relentless about what to let go of. It surprises me to end up with twice as many keepers as giveaways. There are 13 bags of books that will stay, plus coffee-table books stacked on a chair, and only 7 bags to take to Open Books. Well, I need things to put back in the bookcases. I confess that I’ve saved some hardcovers only because they look good on shelves. Intellectuals may deride treating books as decor, but why not? They beautify as well as decorative objects. 

Books that I still hope to open and may underline and make notes in survived the purge. These include nearly all of my books about Chicago, a few psychology and spiritual tomes, a few editing and writing references, cookbooks, and books about interests like container gardening. 

More books can go if I find they won’t all fit when two of the bookcases are replaced with a single piece of furniture. I might cringe as they go out the door, but that will likely be the last time I think about them.