Just The Caffeine Talking: Getting Rid of Books

This week my wife and I tackled the hardest task for any family of readers: getting rid of books.

Our house has about 200 feet of shelves, some of them packed two layers deep with books. We also have stacks of books in the office and the bedroom waiting to be read. They pile up faster than we can finish them.

So Diane and I made a first pass at culling the herd, going through our nonfiction (we'll get to fiction later). I began to notice a pattern in the books we agreed to get rid of.

The biggest group consisted of topics we aren't interested in any more. These are books that we bought in order to find out about something, and now that we've learned it, they aren't really worth re-reading. One example is a biography of "Wild Bill" Donovan I got while researching a novel about World War II spies.

I expect that in the future, my family won't buy many of these books -- at least, not in physical form. It makes much more sense to buy references for a particular project as ebooks, especially since that way I can keep the text right in my laptop so I don't have to lug a bagful of books around.

The second-biggest group were things that weren't as interesting as we thought they might be. In other words, disappointing books. A good example of this is a book called Globish, about the rise of English as the lingua franca of our time. It's not a bad book, really, but I got bored with it about halfway through and never felt like finishing. I've noticed that companion books to television series often fit into this category: they look cool and they cover interesting subjects, but they usually wind up being superficial.

I don't think that category will ever disappear completely. We will always buy books which aren't what we thought they would be, or works which simply disappoint.

Finally there were the books that are simply obsolete. My copy of Charles Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things is a perfect example. It was a useful reference in the pre-Internet era, but now if I want to read up on the history of, say, Silly Putty, there are 290,000 results for a search of the words "Silly Putty History." Reference books which are out of date but not sufficiently old to be useful as historical sources also fit into this category. Note that these books are not just obsolete, they're increasingly obsolete as a class. I don't need to accumulate reference books on odd topics any more, and Project Gutenberg means a lot of older or obscure works are also available online.

Now we've got a box of books to get rid of, and more will follow. I always let my friends go through them before disposing of them permanently. This way my friends can fill up their own shelves, so that when they eventually decide to get rid of books, I'll be right there to see if there's anything good.