I’m done with giving my books away; the liberation/suffering equilibrium is reached
Book Purge Twenty-five — December 11th 2016
I’ve had it with the purge. No more. This was a painful week and there are some books I would really have been happy to hold on to. And twenty-five seems a good number: a quarter of a century of purges sound almost medieval.
The Anthony Flew introductory philosophy book was my set text at university in my first term of philosophy. I was tempted to keep it — for old time’s sake — until I flicked it open and scanned some pages and sections. Dull and very condescending in equal measure.
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is showered with praise whenever I see it mentioned and I used to work with a guy who named it his favourite book. I couldn’t get past half way and I may have kept it in the hope that I would change my opinion were I to pick it up again. I really don’t believe that will happen, so it goes.
The rest of the books in this pile — and most of the books in the other pile — are mainly books that I would keep if I had the room but I don’t, so out they go. There’s not really much to say about them.
I had to revisit the science fiction shelves again. Then there is the usual duplicates — Camus, Ibsen, and Maupassant. I have the Arthur Miller plays in a collected edition so don’t need the smaller Penguins — as my friend Ian used to say when the chocolate biscuits were offered round.
The two John Fowles books take me back to the early 80s, when I was living in Crete. I loved those books then and actually preferred Daniel Martin to the more popular and famous The Magus. But I haven’t opened them in twenty years and I feel they are very much books for young men. They are free to leave.
I’m sure another 50 or 100 books sent to the charity shop would make the shelves clear but I can’t do it: I have made the decision that I’ll stick with what I have for now. New books arriving still mean I need to send existing books out the door: if I don’t stick to that rule then I’m going to end up back needing another purge in a year or so and I don’t want to go through that again.
So some books will need to be stacked on top of others but at least I will no longer need books in front of others: I shall be able to see all the titles on the shelves at last. And that’s a victory. As is the very fact that I brought myself to throw out hundreds of books that I’ve owned, in some case, for over forty years.
And not a bad final total, however painfully reached: 57 books to go out this week. This is quite an achievement when I look back at the first few weeks of the purge and I was listing seven books at a time and complaining that the task was hard then.
The final total, should you care, is a mammoth, heart-breaking, liberating 1,021 books. One thousand and twenty-one.
I don’t know whether to cry or sigh with relief.
My next task is to go through the remaining books and put them in some sort of order. That may throw up further duplicates and the odd book lurking hidden that I will add to the purge pile. But there will be no more weekly updates from the purge front. It is all quiet here now: we’re having a truce for Christmas.
