In response to my previous post, Stuart asked: “So, what do you do with all your books?” The answer got a little long, so I’m forking it out as a separate post.
I don’t have any great solutions. But, if you assume a fixed capacity, there are basically two tacks you can take: get rid of existing books, and limit acquisition of new books.
For a while, I was successful in getting rid of existing books: I would go through my shelves, and, for each book, ask myself “what would cause me to reread this book?” (Or read it for the first time – at the time I started doing this, I owned way too many books that I’d never read.) If I couldn’t think of a good trigger, I would then ask myself “then why am I keeping it around?” Often, I didn’t have a good answer to that, either, at which point it would go on the stack to give away. And I still revisit my shelves periodically with this question in mind: if I ask that question about a book twice a year for five years, and I haven’t actually reread the book over those five years, then my brain is sometimes willing to accept that as evidence that, perhaps, I don’t need to keep the book around.
Also, it’s useful to remind yourself that it’s okay to make mistakes. If you give away a book that you want to read five year later, you’ll probably be able to find a copy five years later. (Which is one of the nice ways in which the world has changed in the last decade and a half!) There are certain rare out-of-print books that I’ll probably never give away, but if it’s some random novel from a non-tiny press, I’ll be able to track down a replacement copy if I want one. Which means that you shouldn’t sweat over being perfect: as long as you don’t just give away books willy-nilly, chances are that the replacement costs of mistakes will be much less than the savings from reduced storage.
This helped a lot. Having said that, in recent years, my rate of book reduction has slowed. Fortunately, we still have some amount of blank wall space in our townhouse. (True story: when moving to California, our first landlady gave us a choice between one apartment with windows on three sides of the living room and one with windows on two sides. We chose the latter: sunlight is all well and good, but we really needed the wall space for bookshelves.) So we’ll buy a few new bookshelves this summer, and I imagine that will last us for a while. (Miranda is actually the one who really needs more bookshelf space.) My guess is that we’re giving away enough books that we’ll last for another decade and a half or so without bursting at the seams, at which point Miranda will be living in her own apartment and we can take over her bedroom!
So that’s the “get rid of books” side. The flip side is: how do you make yourself happy about not buying tons of new books? One answer is the library: if I don’t have reason to believe I’ll want to reread a book or use it as a reference book, I check it out of the library if possible. (And Mountain View has access to a good interlibrary loan program, which I use pretty heavily – I miss Harvard’s libraries, but having interlibrary loan access to several decent smaller college libraries is good enough most of the time.) Another answer is to reread books that I already own: as part of the pruning books exercise, I’m making claims that I want to reread most of the books on my shelves at some point. Which means that I should be happy to test those claims by actually rereading them! If I’m finding that I don’t want to reread those books, well, that’s interesting information too.
For a while I was on a fixed schedule where I’d read a new book, then a book I already owned, then a book from the library. That was useful as far as it went, but I’m hoping that, now that my queue has gone away, I can relax that schedule, reading even fewer new books while still being happy. So if I’m in a mood to, say, reread all the Jeeves and Wooster books (which I already own), I can just go and do that without worrying about screwing up any schedule; if there’s some new book that I’m curious about right now, I can go and read that, but I’ll try to get it from the library most of the time; and I’ll try to browse random books at the library periodically so I get exposed to new authors.
I suppose I should set a target here, just to make my planning empirical. Maybe I should try to restrict myself to, on average, acquiring at most one net new book every two weeks? (Which I can meet either by not buying many new books or by giving away old ones.) I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be able to do that (if for no other reason than that work prevents me from spending as much time reading as I’d like); I usually buy 6 foot by 3 foot bookshelves, so if the average width of books I buy is a little less than an inch, then I’d only have to buy a new bookshelf once a decade under that plan. Seems workable to me.
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Wow, thanks for the reply. I should probably go through my books again with a more critical eye. Along the way I have picked up one useful technique. What I used to do is to make a definite keep/delete decision for every book. This gets tiring very quickly, since I find there are so many books that I’m undecided about. It makes progress extremely slow and I give up fairly quickly.
The technique is instead very quickly to form a first impression of Keep/Maybe/Delete. If you find yourself hesitating, it’s a Maybe, so move on. The idea is to get through a large volume of books instead of agonizing over each small decision. I’ve found that I could get through a very large number of books fairly quickly, and I had put a surprising number into the delete category. I used this technique cleaning out the books from my parents’ house. I think I must have gone through 20 or so boxes and I got rid of perhaps a third of them. Of course, this was fairly easy, since my parents accumulated a lot of books in which I had little interest.
I used this technique with books some time ago, and unsurprisingly, I chose to delete many fewer of them — perhaps only 5%. I’ll have to reread your post and then make another pass. If I get rid of another 5-10% that would be a big step forward for me.
My wife is a lot better than me about using the library. I did update my library card recently — after about 15 years! — and I checked out a few books. Having a deadline is a great impetus for reading them. After I finished them they went back to the library and didn’t clutter up my place. It was great!
Having a “book budget” is a good idea. I should think about that some more.
6/15/2007 @ 1:53 pm
This is great reading.
As for my own situation: we have more books than space, and our solution is that about 80% of the books we own are packed in boxes in our storage space, not to be opened until we buy a house. And I’ve found that it’s been only about three times in two years that I really wished I could look at something that was in those boxes. According to your system, does that mean all these books, or at least all the replaceable ones, are discards?
As for buying new books, I have this problem: I’d say I read about a third of the books that I buy. But I’d also say that if I had to predict, at point of purchase, which ones I’d read, I would do a very bad job. I suppose I could start actually recording these predictions and seeing whether my intuition on this is right!
6/15/2007 @ 3:30 pm
My system suggests that you might end up profitably discarding most of them, yes. Though my reread horizon is a lot longer than 2 years, so I wouldn’t read too much into the evidence just yet, especially given that you were probably busier than normal over those last 2 years (and at MSRI without access to those boxes for several months).
I don’t want to be dogmatic about the details, though: my basic point is that I find it helpful, when considering what books to keep, to have explicit criteria! Some of my criteria are: useful reference book, likely to reread, part of a collection that is important to me, hard to replace, I really will get around to reading this soon honest really I will. I don’t care about the specifics of your criteria: the importance is having the criteria, not what they are. Then go through your books, and mentally label each one that you want to keep with one of those criteria. If you’re not sure you want to keep it, that’s okay; just take your best guess as to a label and keep it for now. I suspect that doing that once will allow you to get rid of a fair number books, and that doing it again a year later will also be allow you to get rid books that were on the borderline the first time.
For buying books, though, I will be dogmatic. Treat all the books you own now as sunk costs: don’t worry about getting around to reading them. Sign up for Amazon Prime. And stop buying books that you think you might read. Instead, every time you start reading a book, decide right then what book you’ll read once you’re done with your current book; if necessary, order it with Amazon Prime, knowing that you’ll receive it within two days. (Alternatively, wander over to your favorite bookstore after dinner, or go to the library, or something: Amazon Prime is useful as a safety valve, since you know any book is never more than two days away, but there’s no particular reason to use it at all exclusively.) And then read that book next!
Based on your description, you’ll save the cost of Amazon Prime within a couple of months, setting aside all storage issues. Or maybe not – I seem to recall that you still buy a fair number of used books. In that case, the calculus gets a bit harder: you can impose a rule of “no more than 3 recently purchased unread books”, or something. The point is to avoid speculative buying: don’t buy a book unless you know when you are going to read it. If you can’t answer that question, then you aren’t getting any benefit from buying it now: you’ll be able to get your hands on the book when/if you eventually feel an urge to read it.
6/15/2007 @ 4:15 pm