I don’t think most book lovers feel this way. I don’t especially think that they should — you do you. But I have had this realization several times in my life (plus once with record albums, once with videotapes, once with DVDs) and proceeded to massively purge my shelves — I’m talking more than a thousand at a go.
It felt good. It made me think deeply about what I actually wanted to get out of books, movies, music. And physically acknowledging that I would never re-read, re-watch, re-listen (or in too many cases read, watch, listen for the first time) was a great weight lifted from me. The decks were cleared, I was unburdened of all those whims of the past which had marked out paths for me to explore, and I had space to consider paths that were attractive to me in the now.
I also suspected, and confirmed from time to time, that it wasn’t all that difficult to remember and track down something I had once read, seen, heard and now wanted to revisit. In my younger years there were times when it was a blessing to have a work on the shelf when it finally came to mind, but those days are gone.
I’m down to a few hundred books on my shelves, one-quarter kept for future reference or sentimental value, the rest books I might want to read in the years left, grouped by theme or author. From time to time I’ll look at one of the groups and say, nope, not gonna happen, and those I immediately donate to the local library. I don’t even want to burden my heirs with knowing that I once found a group of books interesting as they decide what to do with them. Toss them out with my blessing!
I once thought that it was good to collect and curate books as a gift for others. Now I see that the important thing is not the book but what I took from it, which doesn’t accompany a book when I give it. So instead I plan to curate a list of books, noting (briefly) what I got from them. The notes will serve two purposes, either or both of which the reader can ignore: a highly personal tl;dr which stands alone as a bit of wisdom; and a glimpse inside the book which might be helpful when deciding whether to read it.
And physically acknowledging that I would never re-read, re-watch, re-listen (or in too many cases read, watch, listen for the first time) was a great weight lifted from me.
I think you’re experiencing the difference between collecting and real curating. Collecting requires money and physical space. Curating requires emotional comittment.
Good curation is always an ever changing reflection of who you are as a person at that moment.
So very true. Good curation is a snapshot of who we are right now. At the same time, I think we should always be wary of falling into the trap of turning it into an expression of the person we’d merely like to be.
So true, @Alexandra. It seems like there are two ways we could fall into that trap. I would call one of them “overly aspirational” like: I should be the kind of person who can read all the journal articles on this list. Another kind is performative, like if you’re publishing a list of links and you worry about what people think.
In my opinion the best curation happens with physical objects like a real world garden, or a book shelf, or a trading card collection.
I haven’t ever thought about what might happen to all the books, DVDs, CDs/Vinyl and video games we have. We have no children and we’re not planning to have any, so I suppose I would expect that people can take their pick or donate to charity.
However, several times a year my wife will suggest we clear out our unburdened shelves.. and each time I’ll protest that we hold onto things just a little longer. I probably never will read her book collection that dwarves mine (but I like having the potential that at any time I could), or find the technology to play my old video games (but so many memories), or watch all our DVDs, but there is still a real pleasure and comfort in knowing they’re there and - space allowing - looking at them on the shelves from time to time.
I find this interesting because my wife and I have both, independently and simultaneously, recently arrived at the conclusion that we won’t be able to track down the things we’ve read, seen or heard. With the rise of streaming services, we no longer own the media we consume, there’s no guarantee it will always be available, and they actually don’t make physical copies of the latest releases.
We haven’t bought a DVD in years but we’re both keen to rebuild our physical collection. We’re limited by money, space and time, of course.. and I’m sure we’ll ultimately prune the collection. We did it with CDs years ago: we only have those we both love, and we actually have nothing to play them on.
There’s a shift at the moment towards analogue media, at least in the circles I move in. There’s a sense that people, including us, are sick of being served content on a never ending stream and instead want to seek out isolated experiences - a book, a film, an album - to enjoy at our own pace. I’d like to think we will be curators rather than collectors though.
When my dad passed away in the ‘90s, he left behind a rather large collection of classical vinyl records that he had been slowly amassing for fifty years. My sister and I didn’t know what to do with them. We didn’t want them, and they took up a large amount of space, but he had loved them and we couldn’t bring ourselves to just discard them. Fortunately, the priest at the parish he had attended knew of a fellow classical record aficionado who would be delighted by the windfall, so we simply gave them to that fellow.
Some of the greatest pleasures my wife and I had came from not trying to sell an expensive asset but rather passing it along to someone who needed or wanted it. When we moved from Colorado to Virginia I gave a friend our practically new, very capable snowblower. We didn’t need the snowblower or the money, and it was a mind-blowing windfall for him.
My wife trumped me, though, when she decided to pass along her high-end baby grand, inherited from her father and of great sentimental value but unused by any of us, to a good friend who was a piano teacher and professional musician in need of a quality instrument at home. The pleasure of that was doubled when fifteen years later we had a call from him, saying he had inherited his dad’s Steinway and no longer needed ours, so was it OK if he passed it along to his top student, who needed a quality instrument? Of course it was his to give, but so pleasant for him to ask, as well as to learn that it was adding another stop to its gifting journey.
I welcome opportunities like that. They teach me not to hold onto things, to stop trying to maximize my bank balance, to be considerate of and generous toward others.
I always remember a story —forgive the imprecision— about an architect, perhaps Luis Barragán or Mies van der Rohe, who once owned thousands of books and later in life reduced his library to just a few dozen. A radical clearing out.
It often makes me think about learning itself. I find it difficult to make a clear list of what I took from each book. Some sentences stay with you from the first reading, perhaps because they echo something you are living through at the time. Other times a book simply organizes ideas that were already in your mind, but scattered.
Learning feels more like a wall made of bricks. You know they’re there, holding something up, but it would be hard to identify each one individually.
I have reread only a few books entirely, but I often return to my highlighted passages. And that’s when I confirm how difficult learning is to measure, and therefore how difficult it is to curate consciously.
I also see that many people make these purges for reasons of space or money. In my case it wasn’t very different: I migrated to another country. The first time was practical; the second, more sincere. Leaving boxes behind felt like postponing the problem. In the end I gave many of them to a small-town library connected to someone close to me, which felt like a fitting destination.
I kept very few. Some read, some unread, but all with a particular affection attached to them.
Perhaps we really could live with a limited number of books, records, or films. Any number is arbitrary. But then again, so is any accumulation.
Preach it! That’s one reason I was so pleasantly surprised by Readwise, without asking it started to send me regular small samples of the thousands of Kindle highlights I had made over ten years of reading, passages I thought were noteworthy at the time but rarely returned to. Bringing those thoughts to front of mind, even to have them fade away again, is both edifying and pleasurable. A repeat look at those bricks gives me notions about how to proceed with building the wall.
I’ve reread a very few good books, more of them as I get older, almost always getting more benefit than I expect. I think what kept me from it in the past was opportunity cost — too many other good books out there I could be reading instead. That was an unhelpful attitude. Even now I would be better off with more re-reads of a few particular books — Pragmatism by William James, The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand — than visiting yet another (good) book on climate change or the simple life or Gen Z culture or the Gilded Age or the nature of consciousness or how to write well or propaganda or community.
Having an abundance of options is the enemy of depth. Even narrowing down the topics one focuses on doesn’t help much, there are still too many good books out there! I now have a short list of treasures — maybe I should just deliberately set myself a discipline of reading only from that list, for a good while.
I’ve thought a little about what will happen to my books when I die. I’ve had to move fairly often, and have culled them when I do, so they haven’t accumulated to more than a small wall’s worth. At this point I have just enough books on the shelf that when my webcam shows me sitting in front of them, I look smart. (That’s what books are really for these days, isn’t it?)
A few are sentimental to me, but I know my kids won’t want. For example, I have one of my mom’s clinical pathology textbooks from the ‘50s. It hasn’t been useful as a textbook in half a century. And it’s not small. No one is going to want it. Things like that will probably get pulped when I die, but then I suppose so will I.
My kids will probably read some of my fiction books if I name them specifically. But less is more, so I’ll probably suggest a few in particular for each of them and then whatever happens to the rest happens.
I also have a collection of political and ideological books some of which are actually fairly rare, such as a collection of essays by Benjamin Tucker that was printed over a century ago, but I’m fairly confident I can find a welcome recipient for those when the time comes.
