Musing Mondays (Feb.22)

((Musing Mondays are hosted by Rebecca!))

This week, Rebecca asks:

Do you keep all the books you ever buy? Just the ones you love? Just collectibles? What do you do with the ones you don’t want to keep?

I do keep most of the books I get… I do still have a dream of one day owning my own in-home “library”. Just waiting for a house big enough to have a room all to myself for my books.

I used to keep every book, but lately I’ve realized that it just isn’t practical right now. I don’t currently have the space to keep every book that comes into my possession… so I’ve been trying to give away all of the books I’ve read that aren’t either (1) “A” ratings from me and worthy of a reread some day, or (2) good to reference back to later. Right now, I unfortunately have about 6 Rubbermaid totes full of books out in my garage ’cause there just isn’t space for them all to hang out on my shelves (see my full collection HERE).

Last Spring, I did a thorough purge of my shelves (as best as I could, anyway! LOL). And, I ended up getting rid of 200 books, if you can believe it! I pulled everything that I figured I wouldn’t get to anytime soon but that I could re-buy if I ever felt the need (if a book was likely out-of-print by now, and I still wanted to read it, I kept my copy). I’ve received a lot of books for free — for example, I got 4 boxes of paperbacks via Freecycle.org, so there were a lot of books I kept “just because”. They weren’t necessarily books that I’ve bought because I wanted to read them… they were books that seemed like I should read them some day, so I kept them for that purpose. But, while purging, I decided that a lot of those were books I’d never read, anyway, so I gave them away to the charity where I was giving the rest of my stuff to (I had just finished doing a full purge of the house & garage, too — after having read Peter Walsh’s book, “It’s All Too Much“, I was thoroughly inspired!)

There were a lot of Christian books that I got rid of, too, and those went to my mom’s church library. I’d been in that library just prior to my purge, and found that they had a lot of empty shelf-space… which inspired me to want to fill it up with my donations. Of course, now I know that I can go back there and borrow any of the books I regret giving away. LOL.

I’m actually looking forward to next year — hubby will be done his schooling, so we’ll more than likely be moving to wherever he can find a job. And, moving means that we have the opportunity to find a house that has a spare room I can use as my “library”. You can’t even imagine how that makes my heart sing!

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