I Don’t Clutter Books, Books Clutter Me

I am notoriously unorganized.

I’m not bragging or even censuring myself. I’m just making a statement. It’s not unusual for me to hijack my sister’s phone, for example, to text our mutual contacts that I’ve lost my cellphone again, I’m very sure it will turn up, but you can text my sister in the meantime.

As I have mentioned before, I live largely in one room. As a sentimental almost 30-something, I have a lot of stuff. And a lot of my lot of stuff is books. Long before I ever thought about attending college, I loved books. Even before I could read I loved books! Lately the books have been breeding like rabbits and now I’ve found myself literally surrounded. My bookshelf is double-rowed and bulging. My hutched desk is bowed. I have five Rubbermaid tubs of books piled in the middle of my room like a modern art fountain, complete with books spilling out the side and into the floor. It’s gotten to the point that I can barely make it to my bed anymore.

So, naturally, I google “cheap clever bookstorage.” I don’t have any staircases to build shelving into, and sleeping on my books seems like a poor idea since I still read most of them. The ideas became increasingly more useless but as I dug through the links, I found this article by Robyn Devine on BecomingMinimalist: Breaking the Sentimental Attachment to Books.

My first thought was to scoff. Bah. There’s worse addictions, right? I mean, I could be selling meth to kids to buy myself even better drugs. I could be killing pirates and collecting cursed coins. I could be collecting heads in a jar for heaven’s sake, so what’s so bad about books? So what if I have four copies of Jane Eyre? Who doesn’t need an extra copy of the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series? And who cares if I’m too old to read Harold and the Purple Crayon?

But then I started reading the article. And feeling self-conscious about the box of ten cent books I’d bought from the library, and the dollar books I’d gotten from my university booksale four years ago. The fact I’ve never read them, or really, even looked at them again other than to ponder making hollow books out of them, started to weigh on me.

For many years, despite the physical things accumulating in my living space, I’ve felt the desire to free myself of the hold mere things have on me. I didn’t realize that other people had similar goals and called in minimalism until just a few years ago. My goal last year was to get rid of 50% of what I own, which was a lofty and largely unrealistic goal. This year the goal was 10%, but even then, the thought of paring down the library was right at the very bottom, right before burning my childhood teddy bear.

I have to be honest. I will probably never own just 20 books (even though I tip my hat to Robyn Devine for that particular accomplishment). I mean, jeez, adding up just my Jasper Fforde collection would pretty much wipe that out, and that’s not even touching the other 16+ books I read annually (these include Narnia, Harry Potter, and Pride & Prejudice, and no, I don’t care that you’re judging me for that). Twenty is a bit unrealistic.

But then again, so is a spouting, five Rubbermaid book fountain in the middle of my bedroom.