Comments on: Books to read box

By: Habbhabb

Habbhabb — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:33:54 +0000

I live in a one bedroom apartment with my husband and am an information hog. I could easily be overrun by books. Now if there’s a book I want, I try to get it as an audiobook on CD’s, or download it from audible.com. And more recently, I discovered Kindle has a read aloud feature for almost all the books they carry. So even if a book is not issued as an audiobook, I can have it read to me using that feature. I still have a lot of books that are visually-oriented (decorating, etc.), but I find that I am able to get through a lot more books if they are audio because I can listen at work or in the car, etc, and they take up a lot less space. If you don’t plan to resell the audiobooks, you can get rid of the packaging and put them in CD holders.

By: April

April — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:56:43 +0000

Baltimore has Book Thing, a free book swap. http://bookthing.org/ “Our mission is to put unwanted books into the hands of those who want them.”

I probably need to make a huge donation again. Yet a few more idealized selves to recognize will not happen.

By: samantha

samantha — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:25:57 +0000

I'm a member of this site book army and through them i found out about this thing where you can swap books you've read and never want to read again for books that other people feel the same about. I'v done 2 and its a great way of getting rid of books. however if you dont get one you like back, your kind of back at square one...

By: mankeybag

mankeybag — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:26:29 +0000

busy stone keyboard house

By: stevenkitche

stevenkitche — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:19:33 +0000

frog all keyboard trust are

By: Angie

Angie — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:35:40 +0000

A volunteer organization now has a project to send books to our military stationed overseas, where they plan to take pictures of the service man or woman actually reading the book. The picture is then sent back to the children of the military wo/man to keep them encouraged to read and keep up their studies! Check with United Way or local service organizations to find out where to drop off books.

I scan magazine pages to files/garden,recipe,politics etc. Keeps me from having stacks of the so’n'sos gathering dryer lint.

By: Shanel Yang

Shanel Yang — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 05:15:33 +0000

Great topic!

My family was poor, so when we got our first World Book encyclopedia set, complete with the bonus Childcraft series, I was enthralled. This intense respect for books — especially expensive, heavy, hardcover college textbooks — lead me to accumulate over time probably over 1,000 “must keep” books. (They filled at least 30 moving boxes!) Unfortunately, my family moved every 4 – 6 years, a habit which I perpetuated well into my adulthood, so I had to lug all of that around with me. Then, when I was suddenly between homes and without any place to house my books, a friend kindly offered to let me store them in his large home library, which was mostly walls of empty shelves after a recent divorce. (I could only assume that his ex-wife had taken all the books.) Anyhow, he assured me that I could leave them there as long as I wanted or take them back anytime. I was grateful and took him up on the offer.

As you might have guessed, I never felt the need to go back for those books. Sure, I get nostalgic for them once in a blue moon. But, that’s not worth moving them back into my life. My memory of them is good enough.

By: Alex Fayle

Alex Fayle — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:26:17 +0000

I used to have a book addiction, but unfortunately my house couldn’t handle the storage requirements, so I went through a process.

1. I went through all my books and moved about 2/3 of them to boxes in the basement.

2. After 6 months I reviewed the books. If I really missed them, they came back out. Others I decided to re-read once more then get rid of.

3. After 2 more months (to give myself time to re-read the books) I called a local University book sale and they came and took them away.

By taking 8 months to get rid of the books, I weaned myself off them. I knew that at any point I could go into the basement and search for any book that I really missed. If I had gotten rid of the books right away, I wouldn’t have pared down so much because I would have been afraid that I’d get rid of something I would miss but not know it at the time.

Of course, the process assumes you have the space to store the books in boxes for a period…

Cheers,
Alex

By: Beth

Beth — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:23:46 +0000

@Bex! – Thanks! It always makes me so happy to see the library love every time Unclutterer posts anything about books.

Since I work in a public library (and, in fact, I’m the interlibrary loan clerk in a state with an *excellent* ILL system – yeah, I’m spoiled!) the only books I own are enduring favorites. If I use or read something once or twice and decide I’m not going to read it again, it goes straight to the library.

I manage my to-read list with the Visual Bookshelf application in Facebook – easier for me than LibraryThing because I’m already on the site doing other stuff; and I’m less concerned about content tagging than status tagging, which in VB is a one-or-two-click action. Each time I move something from “to-read” to “reading,” I take a quick scan of the whole list and decide if there’s anything I’ve lost interest in. This helps rein in the “ooh-shiny” effect, so I add stuff freely and don’t feel guilty about removing it unread.

I do the same thing with my Netflix queue – when I mail a disc back, I log on, find out what’s coming next and re-order the queue if necessary, and weed out things we’ve decided we’re not interested in. On the other hand, there are a few movies that aren’t particularly high priority but I definitely DO want to see eventually, and it does no harm if they sit at #50 or so for months at a time.

By: Lily

Lily — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:25:27 +0000

I could never see books as a neurotic burden or even clutter. Under the bed, out on the coffee table, in bookshelves – wherever , they are my friends. Some I meet up with almost every day, some less often and some I haven’t met properly yet. I don’t see my kids or my pets as clutter or a storage problem and neither do I see my books that way either. I am as fussy as heck in lots of other things but never with books. Books as clutter ? Perish the thought!

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:39:32 +0000

I’m with @arianna, I think. I like keeping a (very) small stack of books-in-progress and books-next-on-my-list at one end of my coffee table. So long as there’s no other clutter on the table — papers, mail, pens, daughter’s toys, etc. — I like the way it looks.

@Ann – One Bag Nation: I just cleaned out my pile of maybe a cubic yard of books by my bed. What worked for me was understanding how they’d accumulated there. I would bring a book to bed, read a chapter, then put it on the floor and go to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat the next night with a new book. I picked one book to continue with bedtime reading and hauled all the others back to the livingroom and shelved them. My new rule is that I’m allowed only one book in my bedroom: the one I’m currently reading at bedtime! And it goes directly onto the nightstand shelf before I turn the light out.

By: Meags

Meags — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:52:21 +0000

I have a “shelf” that I made on my bedroom dresser with about 50 books between two heavy bookends as my “to read” shelf, and I have a nice canvas storage tote on the floor in our living room as my “to be swapped or given away” bookshelf. Anything that is “for keeps” is on our actual bookshelf, and this system works well for me. Up until a week or so ago, I had the “to go” pile in a nasty ugly cardboard box, and just buying the nicer box made a huge difference in looks.

By: sjwilde

sjwilde — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:15:22 +0000

I’m preparing for a cross-country move in August and am drastically downsizing my 2,000 or so books. Many of them are still on the shelves in a “read before I move” category. I’m reading close to a book a day but will still have to get rid of huge numbers that I’d still like to read but am unlikely to after the move. My new rule after the move will be whenever a new book goes on the shelves, an old one goes. Plus I have a Kindle, so I can get many books cheaper with no physical presence. Books have become a true neurotic burden to me.

By: Bex!

Bex! — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:14:11 +0000

I love books, but I also love my local library. I got away from using the library for several years and am now getting back to it. The books I aim to own now are books that are likely to get messy and thus unsuitable for borrowing(e.g. cookbooks, trail guides) and books I really love (would read again, recommend, etc.). It’s saving me space and money (I don’t know how many books I bought, read once, didn’t love, and passed on).

By: Zenplease

Zenplease — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:01:38 +0000

This is really a good idea. I may have a project this weekend!

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http://zenplease.com/zen-please-announcement/