Ian Rankin and Larry Niven help me get 43 books this week into the purge pile
Book Purge Twenty-four — December 4th 2016
I had to raid the crime and science fiction shelves again this week to get anything approaching a decent number of books to go.
Ian Rankin is one of my favourite crime writers. Favourite writers, really. I’ve been reading the Rebus series of books for the last 20 years. In order, naturally, because that’s the sort of book reader — and buyer — I am. The books displayed above are the bulk of the paperbacks before I switched to buying the hardbacks as they came out. One of them is missing because my dad is still reading that one.
My dad is reading them for the second time and, I’m sure, could read them again quite soon without remembering what happened. I, too, have read them twice and I won’t be reading them again. So, much as I love to have them and as much as they offer a slight flavour of my Edinburgh home, they are now really dust traps and shelf-space hoggers that I can let go with a little regret and a lot of affection.
There are a few science fiction books to round off the first 22 books this week. More to follow below.
Larry Niven is my Ian Rankin of science fiction, without the Edinburgh connection, of course. (Niven is a Scottish name, though, so you never know.) the Ringworld books I loved, as I did the books Niven wrote in tandem with Jerry Pournelle, whose column in Byte Magazine I read for years and years. Well, years, anyway.
The columns of 21 books are supported by a couple of Camus volumes that are duplicates. The rest are simply books whose time has come to find new shelves out there in the wide world. I’m especially sad to have to use the Jonathan Raban to make room for other books. I love just about anything Raban writes but as much as I enjoyed Passage, I can’t see myself revisiting it in the next ten years.
I never got round to reading the Iris Murdoch and I have to be honest and admit I feel that the possibility recedes further with every passing year.
It has been another struggle this week to find 43 books to send to the purge pile. It has to be done, of course and the pain is educational to say the least. Slowly, I am coming to see the books as individual volumes to be measured by the quality of their content and whether in years to come I am likely to revisit them. Until now I had a tendency to see a collection of books and was making no judgement calls about the quality of separate volumes.
This reminded me of a landlord I had in Edinburgh around 1980. He told me he was a fan of the short story — I mentioned I was a writer — and that he had 22 feet of books on his shelves. I treated this statement with disdain, of course, believing that length was hardly the correct way to judge a book collection. And here I am almost 40 years later acting in much the same way.
Well, at least I am finally trimming the length.
