How a bibliophile gives up books
By Johanna Michelle Lim
SELECT a particularly mundane afternoon, a holiday preferably, so the rest of the household is out doing equally mundane tasks such as grocery shopping or walking the dog. This is an important step in order to shoo away potential witnesses who may stand watch during those inner battles of giving up, giving in or letting go every time a cover lands in your hand.
Prepare coffee, black, no sugar, even if your lifestyle no longer allows it. You figure it takes a certain decisiveness to drink the brew straight. Liquid courage. You need that kind of clarity to run through the cobwebbed shelves.
Tell yourself there must be some preconceived organization to this chaos. You figure you must’ve arranged them with something in mind — genre, book size, time in your life when it was first read — but you just can’t remember what. So, you dive into one of the most inaccessible shelves, the ones which haven’t seen light in a long time. Those are the results of “quick” visits to secondhand bookstores where you justified to yourself that buying them was an investment, not a whim. Those are relatively easy to give up.
Then, run through the titles you feel you’ve outgrown. Enid Blytons. Nancy Drews. Sweet Valleys. Reader’s Digest’s. Encyclopedias. Atlases. They make up a good quarter of your space. These are the books that made you want to read in the first place and have resulted in you having to wear glasses by the first grade. Realize that these are the books you feel more compelled to keep as a flashback to days when you felt just a little different, a little more alone, and yet happily so, because you preferred filling up your library card instead of playing Chinese garter at dismissal time.
Resist the urge to reread. As you leaf through covers, look at them with detachment even as you are already, in the back of your head, reliving the instant you first ran through its pages. Put them on one side. Watch them make a pile, then two piles, then three. Take deep breaths in between.
And lest the feeling of altruism washes over this supposedly noble act, remember these are not the books you would kick someone’s private parts over. No, those are kept safely in a different part of a shelf, a more accessible part for easier revisiting. Those are the ones you hope to pass on to your children and children’s children after your own last page has turned in a secret hope that your book selection may reveal a part of your soul, a hidden genius, that just fell short from your reality. Just wipe their fresh layer of dust. Run your fingers through their spines. Promise to linger another time.
Resist the urge to scavenge through those you’ve chosen to let go. Imagine how fulfilling it would be to redeem half of your bed space, your floor, your bathroom sink and your work table.
Forgive yourself for not giving out half as promised. Get another cup of coffee as a congratulatory drink for finishing the task without tears or bloodshed. Just as you’ve vicariously lived through the careful words of authors who’ve imparted themselves in you, you are now passing on to someone who has always felt a little different, a little more alone, a new pile of lives to live.
