Confessions of a Book Pack Rat

There’s always so much to do when you get home from a vacation. Like, unpack, and then look around in dismay at all the stuff (mail, email, bills, work, laundry — and seriously, there was more laundry, which makes me wonder what species of brownie or sprite was wearing my clothes when I was in the Caribbean) that somehow piled up while you were gone.

So Sailor Boy* and I spent a little while doing housekeeping and bookkeeping yesterday. And we came to the rather unfortunate conclusion that we have no more space on our bookshelves. The shelves are packed, two and three deep, stacked tight with all of our books — old school textbooks, from both undergrad and grad school, his novels, and my gazillion, fabajillion books.

My solution: buy another bookshelf. SB’s solution: Get rid of some of my books.

You’d think he’d know me better, after all these years.

His argument is that a good proportion of these shelves (or rows on shelves) are dedicated to TBR (i.e., “to be read”) and that a lot of them haven’t moved from that position in the last three and a half years. If I didn’t read these books in three-and-a-half years, I’m not going to read them now, he argues.

I say that’s untrue. After all, it was almost two years after Gina Black encouraged me to read Flowers from the Storm that it finally floated to the top of the pile and caught my interest. (It was great! Thanks, Gina!)

But I can admit that there are a lot of these books on the shelves that I am never going to read. I get a ton of books every year at conferences or trade shows (I have ARCs from 2006 BEA, books that might not even be in print anymore, that I have not read), and they are not all to my taste or interest.

But SB is afraid, with good reason, that if I start going through them and putting them into piles of “may read someday” and “will admittedly probably never read” — well, one of those piles just isn’t going to go very far. Because I like to believe I’ll read them all, someday. It’s someone’s book, that they labored long and hard over.

What to do, what to do…
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* For those of you following, Sailor Boy read both Under the Rose and Rampant this weekend, then lamented that he hadn’t brought Rites of Spring (Break) with us. Have you put in your order?