Intermezzo No. 1 – Books

This post is about one of the most intense relationships I ever had – the one between me and my books.

When I was s child I often felt like the adults around me knew a lot more than I would ever know. They always talked with their friends about things I couldn´t understand. One day I asked my parents where they got all the knowing from and they told me they learned most of it from books (and a little part in school). So for me there was built a strong bound from being intelligent and aducated to owning books. I literally started collecting them and felt great with this. I wished for books to christmas and my birthday and got nearly everything. As I grew older I began feeling sad for all the books I owned but never read but I went on telling me one day I sure would read them all. I imagened myself in the middle of all my great book, knowing each of them deeply and confidentially talking about them.

When I moved out I left some of my books at my mothers home telling myself I would get them to my home one day. In my home then I smoothed the books around the hole apartment. When I finally found this article I realised a quiet simple thing: I just had too much of them. I had been so concentrated on owning them I completely forgot to think about why I wanted the books. I assume at this point I owned up to 250 books. Then I decided I wanted to reduce the amount of books dramatically. I realised it is more important to know the books than to own them.

Here is what I did:

In the first step I seperated the books I had read from those I hadn´t and started working on the once I had read.

I took all the books I weren´t fully pleased with when I read them and donated these to the library. Then I took the once I really love and had read over and over again in the last year and put them on a different shelf. The books left where those I enjoyed reading but didn´t felt motivited to read agian. I asked myself which of these books I wouldn´t get in a public library and donated the rest.

The books I hadn´t read I seperated by topics and looked at the upcoming pattern. Topics I was most interested in concisted of more books then the ones I was moderate interested in. Then I asked myself when I am so interested in that topic, why haven´t I already read these books? Sometimes I had to admit that I felt like I should be interested in this topic but it didn´t seem to fit me. In other topics I´m still highly interested and the hole operation brought my focus back on it. The books I have lost the interest in where donated, whether read or unread. This seemed really content because I wouldn´t read these books anyway.

With the rest of the books I plan to move on like with the already read ones: I want to donate the ones I can get in every library and keep the ones which a rare. (And read them in the next months of course.)

So all in all I want to keep the books which are special to me and let go the ones who aren´t.

This might sound quiet easy but is actually hard work. I felt real emotional pain when I handed over some of the books I owned for years and planned to read every time I looked at the shelf. It helped a lot to write down these titels like saying to the books: You are not forgotten. I let you go now but when it is the right time I will come back lend you from a friend or a library and read you.

For me it felt like emotionally I lost 40 puonds in a month. I felt lighter, clearer and it makes me happy to look at my books. This is a new happyness because it is nearer to the picture I imagined when I was younger. I look at my books and can say: these ones I really know and love.

I set a rule to own not more than 50 books, not including my university related ones. This will make it a lot easy to move to another place! I could figure to change this rule in a few years to about 100 so this is definitely not a live chioce.