Can you ever have too many inspirational books? Yes! Recently I was very proud of myself book-wise. I found 3 fine inspirational books from which I had consumed enough relevant inspiration that I was willing to part with them. I felt even better about finding a good home for them – a local coffee shop that has a small library of meditative type books. I contributed my books. It’s especially satisfying to find just the right home for things I want to give away. I felt virtuous.
But last weekend I was visiting my publisher (Loyola Press) in Chicago and they gave me a gift bag of 8 books. “Here, we’d like you to have copies of the other books that are coming out in the same season as your Blessed by Less book.” How kind and generous. They all look like good reads, but now I have a net gain of 5 books not counting several that have been on my nightstand waiting for attention for too long.
Hmmmm. I’m remembering my own advice about pruning my books in my blog entries starting with Days 295-301 Book Criteria. To summarize,
I gave away:
- Obsolete text books (that’s almost all of them)
- Novels (since once I knew the story, I wouldn’t be re-reading them)
- Most information that I could now pretty easily get online
I kept:
- Children’s books for reading to visiting kids
- Feference books that I preferred to have hard copies of for, well, reference
- Prayer and Inspirational books that I might need for comfort
- Books I use in my work
- Foreign phrase/dictionary/guide books
- Miscellaneous books that I just didn’t want to part with
- Photo albums
I’m sure I could have been more ruthless with the books but that was my first round of pruning. I figured that after awhile I would probably go back and find more that I really didn’t need especially with more and more being available online.
Arrrgh! And now here I am adding to my book collection instead of subtracting from it. Well, I suppose there are worse vices.
I’m wondering – What kind of books are hardest for you to let go of? What’s easiest? Has the internet or digital books helped? How?
