Jonathan Kellerman and I are splitting up
Book Purge Eighteen — October 16th 2016
Only 46 books heading out the door this week, which is a bit of a disappointment after the much larger totals of the last weeks. Two reasons: my ribs and the fact I’m getting closer to the essential books that ‘need’ to remain. More on that later.
Here’s the first 22 books to go this week.
I first discovered Jonathan Kellerman in Singapore. On my lunch hours we would be taken by coach from our remote office to different hawker centres every day. Near most of those eating places I would find the local book swap shop and browse for anything I didn’t know. That’s where I found Kellerman.
My wife Laura enjoyed these books too. We loved the main characters and we loved the crimes. As it were. In some ways these books kept me sane — strange to say — in Singapore. They reminded me that real life continued beneath even Singapore’s plastic face of staid respectability. Kellerman was a hit of noisy smelly life.
But that was then. Time for them to help someone else’s sanity.
Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man doesn’t really sit well with these crime novels. The book was made into a film with Dustin Hoffman that I saw once, long ago. I never see come up in movie listings on TV. I thought it was a good film and it’s a good novel. Not one I shall read again, though.
Here’s another 24 books.
That’s a mixed pile. It’s a cross-section of my interests over many years. Two copies of God Knows is weird, considering I don’t think I even read one of them.
Enough said.
So, 18 weeks into the purge and the shelves feel more ordered and full of books that make me want to read them again. Bringing boxes down from the attic and discovering books I put up them more than a decade ago — and more in some cases — has been like opening presents. Part of the motivation for this whole process was to get back to a set of books that meant something to me and to rid myself of the habit of keeping every book simply because I had read it. Or, like the God Knows, keep it because I bought it long ago with the idea of reading it.
When I was up in the attic last week I managed to damage some ribs by banging against the edge of the attic’s hatch while dragging a box of books towards me as I stood at the top of the ladder. I was being lazy and paid for it. The upshot is that I haven’t been able to get any more boxes down this week and so I have trawled through more of the books I got down last week.
That’s my excuse, anyway. I’m not sure how many boxes are left up there and I don’t know how long I shall be finding books by the dozen to purge. The back of the task may already be broken.
