The variable weight of stars

I’ve written before about wanting to reduce my personal library to something rather more manageable in size, with a higher concentration of books I really like.  As much as I love the idea of having a house full of books, it's an idea that loses much of its appeal if they're books I'm probably never going to read again.  And I must admit I’d rather read a favorite book ten times than read five books of marginal interest twice each.

Of course the problem with this is deciding which books to get rid of.  The past few days I’ve been tempted to begin a massive reorganization (and culling) of my books, but most of the ones I’ve already read I’ve sufficiently forgotten that I would need to read them again in order to decide if they were worth keeping.

I’ve started rating the books I read on LibraryThing (with the nominal goal of getting rid of books that I don't rate highly enough), but I’ve already noticed that I tend to second-guess myself if I happen to notice the ratings later.  “Why did I give that book two stars?  It wasn’t that bad,” I’ll say to myself, or, “How could I have given both these books four and a half stars?  This one is much better than that one.”  Apparently I’m still working on my idea of just how much these stars are worth.

Overbooked

I joined LibraryThing last year, and finally finished entering books a few months ago.  As I went along, I tagged the ones I haven't yet read, and thus discovered that I have far more of these than I thought. In fact, I've worked out that, if I'm really dedicated, spend lots of time reading, don't read anything I've already read, and don't buy or borrow any more books at all, I could probably get through my "unread" books in, oh, about nine years.

Of course, I'm not about to stop rereading books, or buying new ones.  So it's going to take a little longer than that.

I've always preferred buying books to borrowing them, because it gives me a greater sense of connection to the story: If it's my book, then in a sense it's my story.  What I'm recognizing now, though, is that life is short (and some of these books are quite long), and it's simply not going to be possible for me to reread all, or even most, of the books I currently own.  On the other hand, there are some that I know I'm going to want to read again and again (in An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis mentions that book lovers will reread their favorites ten, twenty, or more times during the course of their lives).

I'm beginning, therefore, to see a need to distill my collection, and particularly to decide right after reading a book, while it's still fresh in my mind, how likely I am to reread it, and to sell or donate the ones that seem reasonably unlikely.  The thing I hate about this plan is that it will inevitably involve getting rid of a lot of good books.  I've already decided to let one humongous fantasy series go simply because it's so incredibly long that it would take me two or three months to get through it again.

Naturally, I'll also be buying fewer books.  I'd say I'll be visiting the library a lot more, but there's still the matter of all these books I already own but haven't had time to read yet.  (This is what I get for going to library sales on $2-a-bag day.)

Doing the library thing

I recently joined LibraryThing.  This is one of those rare situations where my tendency to hang on to practically everything because “it might be useful someday” has actually paid off:  I happen to have an old CueCat USB barcode scanner that’s spent the past eight years or so sitting in a box of miscellaneous stuff; I got it when the CueCat company was giving the things away in malls, essentially pushing them into the hands of everyone who passed by.  So I dragged it out, declawed it, and started scanning.

Of course, a number of my books are too old to have barcodes, or ISBN’s, so entering a shelf of books is rather time-consuming.  But not necessarily in a bad way.

Now, it’s probably self-evident that time I’m spending on LibraryThing is time I’m Not Writing.  But this is one of those cases where the distraction (frolicking through my library, so to speak) is happening because I’m not writing, not the other way around.  Real-life stuff has been interfering with my writing time the past few weeks (I really hate it when that happens).  It’s mostly (but not entirely) an issue of having too many other things bouncing around in my head to devote proper attention to my stories.  Which is a good time to do stuff like cataloging things and blogging and redesigning web pages.