Thanksgiving

Nizzibet is napping. Not from turkey overindulgence. We haven’t gone anywhere yet. We’ll be going to BigSister’s at about seven. I think she has to work today. She’s doing the cooking which may mean that there won’t actually be any turkey on this turkey day. It will be delicious so I’m not terribly worried.

This weekend is going to be spent getting the last of the books out of their boxes. This won’t result in getting them all up on shelves. We don’t have enough shelves for all the books. Once all the books are available to look at the process begins for getting rid of some of them. I’ll be applying three standards as I chose –

1. Do I love this book?
2. Is it useful?
3. If this book vanished from the world would I care?

The first standard is easy. That covers a lot of the fiction I’ve got. Not that I love all the books that this standard will cover but it eliminates the majority of the books that I had to push myself to finish.

The second standard is a little trickier. The internet provides us with so much information that many of these books are redundant. But the internet requires that I have my computer on. If I need an image for reference I need to either print it out or have a screen in front of me. For information a book is far more portable and accessible than the most sophisticated laptop. And a book will provide me with the unexpected in a way that the internet can’t. I have to search the internet for the information I’m seeking. As a compulsive reader I’ll read whatever is in front of me. So having books on Russian history makes me more likely to read about it simply because it’t there.

The third standard covers those books that I might not love and that might not be all that useful to me but that I’d be sad if they were to disappear. My two volume study of the grasses of North America. Ethnographic studies of Chinese farmers. Some of the bad (but not boring) novels I’ve got. Books that seem to me to serve a purpose whether by providing odd specilized information or by being an story that someone had to tell (that didn’t bore the hell out of me – sorry, a well-told boring story takes second place to a lively tale told by an idiot).

Let the sorting begin!

2 thoughts on “Thanksgiving

  1. I, too, would hold on to that 2-volume manual of grasses. Even though grasses are darned hard to ID.

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