I went to Cincinnati last week for my mom’s birthday and to say goodbye to their house (the only house I grew up in!) before they move to Florida. Or, as they might say, I came home for my mom’s birthday and to go through the 7 bins of middle grade/YA books that had taken up residence in our friend’s storage unit, plus the two shelves of adult books in my old bedroom/the guest room, and a few other things…
(I never claimed to be good at this; also, I’ve long said that it’s much easier for me to just not acquire things than it is for me to get rid of things once acquired, a sentiment backed up in more quantitative terms by Kahneman and Tversky in The Undoing Project, which I’m almost finished reading. Don’t worry, that one is a library book and also has zero mass, because it’s a Kindle book! Oh…except that I somehow also ended up with the hardcover library edition. See, books are a problem area for me.)
I got rid of (aka put in piles for my mom to donate to a woman who’s collecting 700 books for a Halloween event…with the caveat that she might want to go through them first to make sure she isn’t giving an unsuspecting 7-year-old a Fear Street Holiday Special with the tag line “Happy holidays…you’re dead!!” <– really, is there anything that has more of a ring to it?) TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR BOOKS.
Which sounds like a great deal and something I should be very pleased with, and *I* am pretty pleased with myself, but I think my parents are more focused on the fact that there are still four bins of books plus a little tiny bit of spillover. They keep sending me information about air freight and storage units in NYC. That’s a problem for December Claire, who will be scrambling to find solutions (a friend has offered her Cincinnati basement, but…I have to come up with a more permanent plan at some point).
I took pictures of all of the books I got rid of, even the ones I didn’t remember, because that’s my crutch, and so that I could do a series pondering WHAT authors in the 80s and 90s were thinking. To be continued!
(I know at some point, probably in 7th grade, I had 800 books…so the final count may have been more like 1200, but I made an effort to only count the ones I was giving away and not the ones I was keeping so that I could proudly report to my parents the sheer number I’d managed to part with.)
