I have way too many books in my (small) home. While I am not, alas, the reader I used to be - 2-3 books a week has dwindled to something more like 2-3 books a month these days - but I'm still a reader and I buy books regularly. And I regularly exchange books with my sisters and local brother who are all also readers and regular book buyers. All of us have piles of TBR - to be read at some point - books in our bedrooms, as did our parents. I also trade books with a couple of friends and cousins, and with my nieces.
We have overlapping tastes: history, biography, memoir, mystery, thriller, literary fiction, beach read, historic fiction, essays. And mostly once we read a book, we don't really want or need to see it again. Pass. It. On.
Most of us also read on Kindle, but the downside there is sharing. So we all still buy plenty o' books.
So there's always something to read. My brother-in-law once said that one of the best things about marrying into our family was that it wasn't considered rude to pull out of the action and find a quiet place to read.
Although I have way too many books in my (small) home, I don't tend/want to accumulate anymore books than I already have. And for the ones I do have, I'm culling the bibliophile herd.
The ones I'm hanging on to are mostly books I really loved, but it's mostly small l love. I could probably convince myself to jettison most of them. It's not as if I'm going to do much re-reading. I do re-read a bit: "The Dead" from James Joyce's Dubliners each year. So I'll hang on to that. I'll also hang on to Finnegan's Wake, in hopes that someday I'll actually plow through it for the first time. There are a few anthologies I'll probably keep until I die or downsize (whichever comes first). But for most of the hundreds of books held in bookcases in my den, bedroom, and office, well, as the Irish say Faugh a Ballach! Clear the way!
Where to clear the way to is the question.
Books aren't as difficult to get rid of as, say, computers. (Ask me - or don't ask me - about my collection of old laptops...) And there are still more people who like to read than there are folks who want to take any brown (mahogany) furniture off your hands. But there aren't tons of places that want them. I believe that Goodwill does take used books, and do I have some treats in store for them. Just need to Uber over with my overflowing bags.
The other thing you can do with books is used them for home décor.
Most of us do that as a by-product of being readers. But decorators do buy books and use them to, I don't know, make their clients look brainy?
I've seen rooms where the books are sorted by color! LOL! I don't file my books by Dewey decimal, but my books are grouped by type - short story collections, poetry, of Irish interest - and/or by author. How can you find the book you're looking for if you're going by color? I can tell you that I have a John Cheever short story collection that's red. And Dubliners and Finnegan's are dark blue. Other than that...
I've also seen bookish décor that just uses the spines of books. Why waste all that space with the actual books themselves? I shudder to think of what they do with the guts of the books.
Color-coding and spining at least offer the pretense (totally faux in the case of spining) that someone's a reader. But what are we to make of this decorator trend, spotted recently on Twitter, in which books are plugged into bookshelves backwards?
This I just do not get. It looks, to my reading-strained eyes, ridiculous. What's the purpose here? Other than to provide a bland background of dust-catchers. And eventual home for tiny brown book lice.
One thing about having stuffed bookshelves in your home is that it gives your visitors something to look at. Something that lets them learn something about you. Something to get them talking about mutual interests. What will visitors do when presented with backward books?
My sister and her husband recently sold their book-filled house on the Cape. Kath and Rick's was the place you could always bring your books - and pick up new ones. Every once in a while, they went through and brought discards to the local library (alas, no longer taking book donations). When they were planning on staging their home, the RE agent told them to get rid of the books. Folks, she told them, looking at the house would be distracted by them and spend more time looking at titles than at the fireplace, the view, the new master bath. Fifty-five cartons of books later, they sold the house.
Anyway, I hope this backward books thing doesn't catch on.
Books, after all, are for reading. Or for trading. Or for piling next to your bed so you have something on hand if you wake up in the middle of the night and want to get a little reading in.
But mostly, books are for reading. Non-readers using them for décor? I don't know any people who come under this category, but the very thought of it makes me cringe. Metaphorically speaking, I'd like to throw the book at them.
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