Weeding My Personal Library.

I can hear the collective gasp, now. "What!? Why would you weed your books?" Well, here's the deal. I'm a little bit OCD about books. I only have so much space to house them all, and it bugs me when they aren't nicely shelved. In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that they aren't really shelved in any particular order. Most recently, I reorganized all my books to be a rainbow. I have since found that this drives me bonkers. Firstly, I can't find any book unless I can remember what color the spine is. Secondly, when I add a book to my shelves, I have to scoot everything around to get it in its color spot. Full disclosure again, I don't actually do the scooting thing. I just squish it in wherever it will fit, so my shelves are actually no longer in strict rainbow order. Which, now that I think about it really makes me nuts. Um... I need to go, uh... take care of something. I'll be right back.

Okay, that's all sorted. Now, let's talk about that whole weeding thing. When I get a wild hair to weed, I stand in front of my bookcases and pull each book off the shelf one at a time. I look it over and remember how I came to own it. I ask myself "Have you read this?" "Are you ever going to read it?" "Really?". Then I ask myself, "If you have read it, do you love it?" "If you were moving, would it be worth moving with you?" "Are your kids going to be required to read it?" If the answer is no, then it goes in the box. When the box is full, it goes to Goodwill or the book sale that benefits our local community charitable organization.

I'll be honest. Sometimes I've gone to get a book off the shelf, and I've weeded it. This doesn't happen often, though, and usually it's not something I feel really awful about being without. I can usually get it from the library without too much hassle. I haven't ever been truly disappointed for long when I couldn't put my hands on a book immediately.