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

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

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.

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

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.

@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 the way, I am having a contest to try and get a bunch of RSS readers, subscribe now and be drawn for the mystery prize!

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

There is a difference between things you want to do/read/ wear and things you think you “should” do/read/wear. Keeping “should” things around brings guilt, not joy.

That being said, I just sold two large bags of books to the used bookstore because we needed the shelf space to create a play/art room for my daughter (a work in progress).

The reading pile I find impossible to tame is the one next to my bed . . .any ideas?

The only reason I probably won’t implement this is because I love to see all the books I’ve got, especially when I’m deciding what to read next. Plus, I love the look of lots books, in general. I do, however, try to limit the amount of books I retain because I move often (mostly, like above, I hold onto favorites and to-reads) by passing them on to friends or through PaperBackSwap.com.

Oh, 5 bookcases sounds like a lot, but they’re lining one side of the hallway floor to ceiling — free space and really warms up an otherwise long white hallway.