Malazan Empire: Whisperzzzzzzz - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

I have reached a point where I have too many books for the shelf space available, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it!

I have several hundred books, and don't own a home. Whenever my wife and I move, I have to pack up all my books and lug them to the new place.

A few years ago, I had mostly switched to reading on my e-reader. The warm backlight! The ease of switching books on a whim! The ability to set a standard font and size across every book! The portability! The halcyon days seemed to unfold in front of me. I would buy fewer books and read more!

(As an aside, the death of the mass market paperback is abso-fucking-lutely terrible for making it easy to read on the go. Good luck fitting a trade paperback in your back pocket or even into a sling bag.)

And, for a time, this was true.

I bought fewer paper books — only those whose spines I coveted seeing on my shelves made the cut. This allowed me to temporarily set aside the Too Many Books problem. Yet, in recent times, I have yearned more and more to return to the simplicity and single-purposity of paper books. The e-reader carries too many distractions, and in the end, its be-screened-ness (even if it is e-ink) is a distraction in and of itself. I have been seeking to unbundle my device — moving from a state of one thing for everything to many things, each for one thing. A multi-purpose world to a single-purpose world.

As another layer, as I think about having children, I become more and more concerned about what behaviors and values I will model for them. Even if I know that I'm reading a book on my e-reader, they won't. They'll just see a flat slab with a screen, akin to every other flat slab with a screen. I'd much rather them see me reading paper books and grow up appreciating the medium, instead of The Great Flattening where every method of consumption is relegated to the flat slab with a screen.

These two factors have converged in a renewed desire to read paper books. Yet, if I want to keep adding to my collection, I need to subtract from it too. It has grown to be a heaped up great pile, books beyond count, hoarded by a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm...oh wait, that was Smaug. Anyway, while my collection is not quite a dragon's hoard, it is certainly straining the shelf space I can allot to it.

I know there are many books I want to keep — books I cherish and look at fondly on my shelf, enjoying both their gilded spines (I'm looking at you, Fitz and The Fool UK Editions!) and the memories they surface. There are many other books who I look at and can appreciate their role as essential links in the chain of my reading history (definitely not like the chains Karsa drags behind him, right?), but which are not really books I strongly desire to keep. In some cases, they're books I read but didn't even really love.

I just feel like if I give them away, I lose something of myself. Something that reminds me of what I really am, that is a part of my history and my self-image.

How do you all handle this? How do you say "thank you and goodbye" to books?