I kind of promised myself this year that I will not buy more books until I’ve read all the ones that are already on the shelves. Well, that has gone completely out the window already. I’m about a dozen new books purchased this year, and it’s only been a month! There is literally no more room on my two IKEA BILLY bookshelves. I’ve resorted to stacking the news one horizontally on top of the books already there.
In my defense, I do tend to read all of the new books that I buy. But with shelf space becoming an acute issue, I soon will have to make a decision: either buy and create more shelf space, or donate a portion of the books. Because let’s face it, I’m not going to stop buying new books. That’s just not happening.
Donating the books will be easy: I work in a campus library that takes donations. The hard part will be figuring out which books to donate. That’s when the emotions and sentimental value kick in. Marie Kondo doesn’t have a solution for this: what if everything sparked joy? A more useful standard would be to toss anything that have not been touched/used in the past 12 months. The likelihood of such a book ever being touched again is near zero.
I previously had dreams of stuffing as much books and shelf space as possible into my room. A wonderland of books, if you will. The coziness scale will certainly be off the charts. However, that would clash against a strong sensibility of mine: cleanliness. It’s a simple equation: the more stuff you have, the more difficult it is to maintain it.
This is why I’m kind of rethinking about getting a second car. Sure it’ll be fun to have a different kind of car to drive around, but it will be two times the effort (and costs!) to maintain. That’s a tremendous time investment, even for something I am deeply passionate about.
And dab.