day 8: book by book

I have a theory (excuse) that you can’t spoil kids with too many books, and given that my girls love the collection that Mom saved from my childhood, I have sentimental visions of my grandchildren coming for sleepovers and reading their Mothers’ favourites. It makes it difficult to give their books away.  I had gone through a purge of the kids’ books a few weeks ago, and trying to find those that weren’t gifts, or had special meaning, was challenging.

Crono  and I also both have a ‘there’s a book for that’ attitude about anything we are interested in. When we vacationed in Austria with his German relatives a few years ago, I was determined to speak to them. 5 books later, I could understand fairly well, but French tries to comes out first whenever I attempt German. “Je me souviens” too well apparently. According to our stash, we have been interested in organic lawn care and gardening; non profit sector consulting, writing children’s books and web site design; the global economy and it’s collapse; recovering from Catholicism (not mine); all of Kevin Smith’s books (and DVD’s); and did you know the Scots invented the modern world? And I haven’t addressed our hobbies, knitting, sewing, cooking and woodworking – as those groups of books most certainly fall under the moniker “collections”.

Conveniently, the majority of our books have moved twice with us, and were all together at the back of our storage under the stairs . In other words, I had to pull out tons of hobby stash to even get to them. More on this elephant tomorrow. Right or wrong, I decided that if we hadn’t looked at the books for over three years, they are all going to donation next Friday. Crono is potentially going to freak when he realizes this, but you are either part of the solution…..

When sorting through our bookshelves, I happened to come across Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott. A wonderful read and firmly in the keep pile. Just seeing it on the shelf helped me push through the rest of the chaos in the rec room. In the end, I had 6 bags of paperbacks, 7 boxes of unpacked books, 2 piles of magazines for recycling and two bags of collection, oops, I’m mean craft books.

Through this process, I’ve also made a big mess of displaced hobby stash that I hope to address tomorrow.