Book purge takes a page from Marie Kondo – Daily Bulletin

I’m as reverent toward books as the next person, unless the next person is a school board member in Tennessee. That said, books have come and gone from my life over the decades. It’s simply that an awful lot had come and never left.

Toward the end of last year I decided it was time for a book purge.

In this I was inspired by my Chino Hills friend Doug. Over lunch in Riverside at Tio’s Tacos last fall, the book maven — who reads everything from Doctor Who e-books to every last Charles Dickens novel — had surprised me by saying he’d done the full Marie Kondo routine on his bookshelves.

He’d taken down all his books, examined them one by one and discarded enough to fill eight boxes. This included some he hadn’t read and finally accepted he would never read.

In a book-world version of keeping up with the Joneses, this persuaded me to comb my own shelves to pull books. I was overdue.

Every December I gather all the books I’d read the previous 12 months, pile them up and take a photo — and then return all but six or eight to my shelves.

Clearly I could do better. And my bookcases were packed tight. So, at the end of 2021 and the first weeks of 2022, I started in, one shelf at a time.

You know about Marie Kondo, right? She’s the organizer who suggested that you should look at each book individually, tap it to see if it still “sparks joy” — and then probably get rid of it anyway, because nobody needs more than 30 books. Later she said she’d been misunderstood, and that if books are your passion, you should keep as many as you want.

I’m sure many of you are thinking: “I don’t even own 30 books.” Don’t worry about it. We book lovers are taking up your slack. In fact, many of us own a lot of books, and we can be kind of pious about it.

You know, “my books are my friends,” “I couldn’t bear to part with a single one,” “the printed word is sacred,” baloney like that. Change “books” to “aluminum TV dinner trays washed and stacked to the ceiling” or “piles of expired coupons for household products I don’t even use” and you might take a different view.

Granted, my personal fantasy is out of a 19th century novel. It’s either a beautifully stocked, floor-to-ceiling private library into which I could retreat, or a men’s club — “If you need me, I’ll be down at the club” — with armchairs and copious amounts of reading material.

Either place would have an enormous globe in a stand, a globe that one would spin to point out the scene of some past adventure by tramp steamer.

However, this is, sadly, the real world. Especially for us renters, space is not unlimited, nor are moving boxes, and few of us once we’ve read a book are going to reread it. So, if I owned a giant globe, I would be forever stubbing my toe on it.

I started my purge with my science fiction bookcase. I took down a row of books, blew the dust off the tops, dusted the shelf, spread the books out and looked at each one.

Three writers take up a majority of the shelves: Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. But were they sacrosanct?

Surprisingly, no. I found books by each that I couldn’t imagine reading again, some of which I regretted reading the first time. Completism is a mug’s game.

Other bookcases produced similar results.

I’d been toting around Robert E. Howard’s Conan paperbacks since middle school — middle school! — and hadn’t touched them since, other than to pack them into a box whenever I moved. I decided to pack them into a box to sell.

I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first 10 Tarzan novels and didn’t see why I’d ever want to do so again; same with his five Carson of Venus novels. His John Carter of Mars series, read in its entirety last year, was more inventive. I may never read them again, but for now, I’m keeping them.

Some unread books I had to accept that I did not truly want to read.

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is said by some to be better than Tolkien. I owned the trilogy in Ballantine paperback form as a teenager, sold them without reading them, later bought them again out of nostalgia and still hadn’t read them. sorry merv If it’s any consolation, I could never finish Tolkien’s trilogy either.

I owned a book on the Crusades and a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton, and after a few minutes with each, decided that if I ever want to know more on the subjects, that’s what Wikipedia is for.

Literature was not spared either. I had ambitiously bought Dumas’ entire Musketeer series, five books adding up to 3,200 pages, all unread. Aren’t there new, more faithful translations coming out? Maybe I’ll start over with those, one at a time. And borrow them from a library.

I can tell people truthfully that I have read “Atlas Shrugged,” but I no longer feel compelled to keep my copy to prove it. So boy was it boring.

Certainly many books could not be parted with, at least not yet.

I don’t need these many Dave Barry books, but many of the keepers are signed to me personally from author appearances. (Sample: “To David, who is the mother of my children. — Dave Barry.”)

Or my beloved Bantam paperbacks by Ray Bradbury, cherished since childhood, some with the names of long-gone Midwest used bookstores stamped inside.

I have yet to tackle “Don Quixote” despite owning two different translations, but I’m keeping them both as a spur to read it, even if it is 1,000 pages.

What surprised me was that it was easier to get rid of many books than I’d expected. That’s a reflection of middle age, I think. You become more practical.

My initial goal had been to cull 10% of my 1,000 books. This had sounded impressive until the realization that that meant I’d be keeping 90%.

Ultimately I pulled 25%. (My friend Doug, meanwhile, got rid of one-third of his.) Sure, I kept 75%, but I look at it like the joke about what you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean: “a good start .”

And in December, when I gather the year’s books on my floor for a photo, most of them will go into a sale pile, not back on the shelves.

David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, culling the four other days. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.

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