Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Sorting them out
I can’t part myself from Path Beyond the Stars or any of the other dozen hard-to-find vintage SFs which, while uniformly atrocious, give me some weird sense of comfort.
I could make an appreciable dent in these piles by giving away all of my Pratchett, but I keep thinking that one day, my son is bound to catch the Pratchett bug. I mean, the kid sucks down everything Christopher Moore writes; he’s bound to like Pratchett, right?
And I can’t give away our graphic novels, nor my classics (SOME day I’ll manage to read Paradise Lost), my nature books, my pet care books, or books written by my friends. I would like to give away 120 Days of Sodom but I figure no one else will want it on his shelf, either.
I can’t give away Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor series, since I hope to reread it one of these days, nor can I give up Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, which I find unreadable, but I still want to know why some folks still make a fuss about Pynchon. I won’t give away my Michio Kaku or Steven Weinberg or Kip Thorne — all scientists who have popularized their work for the lay reader — because my son might want to read them some day.
I’m having an easier time parting with a good number of writing books which never did me a damn bit of good, such as The Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, whose title implies that I am something lower than an idiot. Al Gore’s Assault on Reason isn’t going to take up shelf space, nor the work of Cory Doctorow, Scott Lynch, Joe Haldeman, Jon Scalzi, or China Mieville. I’ve enjoyed some of these authors but I have no desire to reread their work. Out they go.
I think I need to go back through the “keep piles” with a sterner eye. But how can I give up my volumes from the Norton Library, or my handsome two-volume collection of Sherlock Holmes stories which I’ll never read but which I’ll always mean to read? It’s hard to part with books you’ve read partially and meant to finish but never did. Like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which lies on my table eighteen inches away, and which has once again lost my interest. (Yeah, that one’s gotta go.)
And don’t even get me started about all of our textbooks.
D.
I sympathise, I really do. We have at least one jammed full bookcase in every room (except the bathroom, and even *there* there’s usually a book or two on top of the loo!) and five on the upstairs landing. It’s got to the stage where I have to be really strict: if we’re buying a book, one has to go to make room for it. There are quite a lot we’ll never get rid of, but otherwise we tend to restrict it to unusual or hard-to-find volumes, or complete collections (the ‘classics’ – which include all the religious books we have, bible, torah, mormon, rg veda, quran etc – we’ll keep as well). The problem is there are so many I think I’d like to re-read, but know that really, I’ll never find the time, and I don’t know if our son will ever want to explore them…
The “too little time to read everything I want to read” problem really bugs me if I let it. Life is too short.