Sixty books to go this week: we’re flying now.
Book Purge Fifteen — September 25th 2016
The big 60 this week. That’s a lot of books lying on my floor at the moment. There are too many books, in fact, for one photograph, so I had to take three to show all the titles clearly. These photographs are my record of the books I’m ejecting because I’m too lazy to write all the titles down.
A lot of science this week. I went through a bout of science book buying in the mid 1980s and then when most of these paperbacks date from. I won’t be reading them again and it’s quite possible that much of the science has moved on since their publication. It’s equally possible that were I to read them again I would understand less than I did the first time.
Also of note is the Finnegans Wake annotations. I bought that from my friend Jonathan when he was selling books at the end of his studies at UCL in the very early 80s. It has not had a lot of use since then. It was typical of me that I wanted the book for no good reason other to kid myself that I would use it to help me read Finnegans Wake. Time to let that self-delusion go. (Although I’m not throwing out my old Faber & Faber copy of that just yet.) Everything else is obvious enough. Books I have loved and read but won’t read again and which I am keeping for all the wrong reasons.
A real mix from photo two. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was a book I really enjoyed. The two Ebdons are from my period of loving everything Greek after living in Crete in 1982/3. The Cosima Wagner diaries were a gift from my mother-in-law to my father-in-law, which then came our way on their early deaths. The sentimental connection is not enough to save them. More Chinese medicine and a few design books that I will not be revisiting.
What can I say about that mixed-bag? The best part of studying Japanese, which I did at a language class that ran in London’s Savile Row back in the mid 1980s, was that I met a lot of Chinese students who used to take me to Chinatown after the class. They ordered food without looking at the menu and introduced me to some of the customs and rituals of Chinese eating that came in handy when I moved to Asia in the early 1990s. It was in Asia that I bought the book on Jade. I was already interested in Chinese medicine and the I Ching.
Lots of big books this week and it’s not all going to fit easily into a box. This book purge lark could start impacting my health as I carry loads from the car to the charity shop.
I’m going to try for 70 books next week.
