Getting Rid of Books
I have a lot of books. Christi’s dad built us a great bookshelf to hold all of our books, but we filled it up and had to get several Billy bookcases from Ikea. This is partly because we live down the street from an almost-free bookseller. Christi used to walk past the bookseller every day after work and come home with an armload of books. After she quit working for Nolo, the influx of books slowed, but did not stop. Christi’s parents live in Portland, and every time we isit, we go to Powells Books (http://www.powells.com), the world’s largest bookstore and buy even more books. We could open a library of books on orchestration and leftist political tracts. Whenever we go to Powells, Christi makes a bee-line for the music section and I head over to the Chomsky shelf. We rendezvous later in science fiction. But we don’t have as many sci-fi books as you might expect. Probably because our arms are already full of other books.
Anyway. I really like books, although I do not read nearly as often as I used to. I even went through a period of no reading at all. The boom years were really a culturally dark time. I read again now, but not nearly as quickly as I get new books. Fortunately, Chrsti reads extremely quickly and has read almost everything in the house, which now has more books than my grade school’s library, although less science fiction.
Since I will shortly be moving a long distance away, I’m making a stack of books to be sold. It is a very small stack so far. I look at a book and I either have read it through, have started it, was assigned it for school, but never read it, or just never read it. So either I started or finished it and I liked it, or I feel guilty for not finishing it or not reading it and want to keep it until I do finish it. There are very few books that I don’t like. Really. So the stack of books to sell includes science fictions that are too auful to even be campy (although I kind of liked hem anyway, in a campy sort of way) and right-wing political tracts. All of the rest of our books are either nice, have the potential of being nice, once I get around to reading them or must belong to Christi. I know I didn’t buy Monica’s Story, so it must be hers.
