Book-culling - Lynne Benton

Before we had visitors to stay over Christmas, we had to clear out an awful lot of “stuff” from the sitting room and find somewhere to keep it, temporarily.  Most of the “stuff” consisted of piles of books, ones I’ve acquired, from one source or another, over the last year or so but haven’t yet read, so I packed them into 5 boxes and decided to store them in my study till after Christmas.

Now Christmas is over and I needed to move them in order to get back to my study.  Three of the boxes are currently back in the sitting room, so not only are they not pretty to look at, I can’t see what I’ve got and what I want to read next!  This means that my New Year Resolution is becoming increasingly obvious: I must have a clear-out, so these extra books can find a space on a shelf until I get round to reading them.

It’s not as if we don’t have any bookshelves/cases in the house: I’ve just counted them up, and we have 13 tall bookcases plus several wall shelves – and they’re all full!  I know, I know, the trouble is, I’ve got too many books!

But then, I love reading.  As Dawn, Anne Rooney and Vanessa have all said in recent blogs, writers read.  I don’t know one who doesn’t.  I can't remember a time when I didn't read - anything and everything I could get hold of.  My problem is getting rid of the books I’ve read.  It just seems wrong, unless I really hated the book – and if I hate a book it is easily culled.

I started with the lower of two long shelves in the sitting room.  Surely some of these old non-fiction books could go, I thought?  A fat Biographical dictionary, for example – I used to use it a lot, but nowadays if I want to know about anyone, I google them and find out everything I want to know online.  So that can go – and leave a nice fat space for something else.  All those “What not to Wear” and "How to look good" books are so out of date that they can go, as can a few big information books which turned out to be not as interesting or useful as we'd thought. And do I really need to keep Marie Kondo’s book about the Magic of Tidying?  It will only serve to remind me how rubbish I am at keeping things tidy – and besides, I gather she herself has changed tack slightly nowadays.  So that can go.

That takes care of a few, and I know I’ll find more in the same vein which can also be junked.  But can I bear to get rid of all the fiction books that I really enjoyed? I've often lent books to friends, in order to introduce them to a new author, but do I want to keep them all just so I can be some sort of private lending library?  Not really.  Will I actually ever read them again myself?  Possibly not.  So maybe I should get rid of those too…

The trouble is, once I start flicking through an old favourite to see if I really do want to get rid of it, I start re-reading it and remembering how much I enjoyed it.  So might I want to read it again?  Maybe I’ll keep that one then.  But what about the rest of the series?

This is one reason, of course, why it’s easier to read books on my kindle.  When I’ve finished reading I can delete it from the kindle, but crucially I know I can always get it back!  Once I’ve culled my real books and given them away to a Charity shop, that’s it.  If I want to read it again I will have to buy another copy.  And that really would go against the grain.

So it's back to the original problem - I'm running out of book-space!

Well I’ve culled a few, and emptied one box.  But there’s still a long way to go, and I’m not sure how long this resolution will hold…

Website:

www.lynnebenton.com