Keeping and culling

I find it incredibly difficult to cull my books.

I convince myself that I have a good reason for keeping every one of my keepers. Most of the time I have, but not always. Generally, I keep a book I know or strongly believe I will read again. I have also kept some of my old university text books, knowing that they can be good for reference, and so it has proved, for some of them. Others I keep just because I once enjoyed them, and might again, which leads me me to the next category: the many books that I keep planning to re-read, but I never get round to. My travelogue collection is big on those. And then there are the travel guides I keep that are years out of date, because they have memories attached to them. Can't let go of those, now can I?

I cull about 95% of my owned books after I read them, which is a lot. Many go on my BookMooch list, some I give back to the charity shop, and the hardcovers and the paperbacks that are in a 'like new' condition I donate to the library. I keep telling myself that I should cut down on the book buying and concentrate on books I think I might want to keep after I have read them. Fat chance.

Then there are the TBR books. By my estimation, about 80% of my 900 odd TBR books were bought very cheaply from a neighbourhood charity shop, and most of them on speculation. The rest I got through BookMooch, was given or bought new. I often buy books I would like to read but which end up sitting on a shelf for a couple of years before I either read them or find them and think to myself: "why on earth did I buy this?", and cull them without reading them. I think I have a subconscious fear of seeing a book I want to read, not buying it when I have the chance, then not being able to find it anywhere, leading me to hate myself for not grabbing it when I had the chance. This is of course one of the varieties of the dreaded Reader's Anxiety. Unfortunately, having all those books sitting around unread can cause another variety: the one where you take a look at your bookshelves and think "I will never be able to read all these books!"

On Sunday morning, I finally put into action an idea I have been toying with for a while. I opened the Excel file in which I keep the list of all my books and opened the TBR spreadsheet. Then I opened the gegnir.is website, which is a database of the book collections of many Icelandic public libraries, including all the ones I have access to. Then I made a new spreadsheet, titled TBR-once owned. Then I took a long, hard look at my TBR shelf and noticed some authors whose books I remembered seeing in some library or other. Then I sat down and searched the Gegnir database for all the titles I owned. All the ones that were available from a library I have access to, I moved from the My library spreadsheet to the new spreadsheet, then took the books down from the shelves. Some will go in my BookMooch inventory, and the rest I am taking to a second-hand book shop to see if I can get some money for them. If not, it will be a gain for the charity shop.

The initial cull only yielded 20 books, some by writers whose books I enjoy but nevertheless know I will not want to own. A "what the hell was I thinking" cull yielded another 2 books. 22 books is not much for a library of this size, just barely over 1% of all the books, but it's a start. I aim to get my TBR-owned list down below the 900-mark before the beginning of June, through a combination of ruthless culling, culling with intent to read later, and reading and culling.

Ideally, I should follow up with less book-buying, and since I now have a definite financial goal to aim for - I am saving up for a trip to Egypt - that should make it slightly easier. However, it remains to be seen whether I will merely be making space for even more TBR books, or whether I manage to keep my book-buying impulses under control.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

Reading in Reykjavík

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