I love my books.
I don’t like physical possessions in general. I’m always trying to get rid of stuff (much to the chagrin of my wife and kids). I want a laptop, phone, guitar, and roof over head. Everything else just seems like maintenance and mess.
Except books.
I’m a sucker for physical books.
I do purge them regularly, trying only to keep books that either a) I would read again, b) I will read for the first time, c) were so instrumental in my life I will reference or give them to others.
Still, it leaves a lot of books. Most of them are at the office, and the rest are scattered between different shelves in different rooms of my house. It drives me nuts. My preference is to have one contiguous wall of shelves where all my books can be arranged left to right top to bottom in order of my intellectual journey. I have done this probably half a dozen times in several different houses. But then my kids always pull them down, put them back out of order, etc. Then I loan some, then need some at the office, then we re-arrange rooms and bedrooms, and before long they are a scattered mess.
I’ve toyed with getting rid of the lot of them and going all digital. After all, I use Kindle and audiobooks now 75% of the time anyway. But I just have so much attached to so many of my books! I dream that one day my kids will scan the shelves and get excited by the same books I did as a teen. This probably means that they can sense this hope in me and will therefore be repelled by my books. That’s how it is with my kids. ;-)
For now, I’m keeping them and resigning to them being in a state of semi-disarray. My pain is great.