Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from James Ball, a former newspaper reporter who thought his story might help others.
A 32-gallon plastic storage container holds approximately 50 paperback books, or 25 hardbacks. If you stack them the right way, you can cram in an extra five paperbacks.
I know this from experience as a book hoarder.
Over the years, I’ve housed dozens of these boxes in my garage. I’ve also stuffed them into closets and tucked them away in guest bedrooms telling myself that “someday” I’d get around to reading the books that had looked so irresistible at the bookstore. But I was lying to myself.
For me, collecting books was no longer a hobby. It had become a labor that was encroaching into my physical space and taking up way too much mental space. Worst of all, I was paralyzed by too many choices, meaning I never read anything anymore.
Something had to give.
A decade ago, my maternal grandmother – the woman who taught me to love books – suddenly died. After the funeral, we set out to clean out her condo.
My grandmother wasn’t a hoarder by anyone’s definition of the word. There were no endless, messy piles of stuff in her house. In fact, she proudly kept her house very tidy and organized, but as we dug into her closets and dressers, it was clear she collected a lot of things. Christmas decorations with price tags still affixed to them, unopened orders from home shopping networks, and – much like myself – a massive collection of printed materials including books.
In her final years, my grandmother led a fairly lonely existence. She had family nearby, and I suspect occasional dinners with them probably blunted the edges of her solitude, but these short visits weren’t enough to fill every single hour. She likely experienced more lonely, existential moments than joyous ones in her final years. Buying things had filled a certain void in her life.
Why, then, in the fullness of life, did I need so many things, I asked myself? I had everything that already mattered. As I hauled the last box of her possessions to a donation center, I vowed that when my time was up, I’d leave my wife and children with memories and experiences, not the chore of cleaning up after me.
When I turned 40, I kicked off a long period of introspection and reflection. I took stock of my life and everything in it. As I read about the minimalist movement, I was drawn to its simplicity and its inherent promise that, with less stuff you actually become a richer person in all aspects of your life.
I read everything written by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. I became a follower of Joshua Becker and Leo Babauta’s blogs and hung onto every word written by Courtney Carver and Francine Jay.
I nodded my head as they spoke of decluttering and removing the inessential. But while I agreed in principle, it was clear I had a problem.
Still, these were my books. My Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1 might not be worth more than a penny on Amazon, but I had toted this very book to my freshman English 102 class at the University of Georgia in the fall of 1991, poring over short stories by Thoreau and Melville. Surely, that had personal value. And hadn’t I always dreamed of someday opening a used bookstore with an ancient three-legged cat roaming its dusty stacks? When that day came, I would have enough books to seed the business. Note: this is exactly how we lie to ourselves.
I had enjoyed almost none of them because I had lost sight of the purpose of owning a book – to extract an experience or bit of knowledge from it and pass it along. By acting this way, I was not only being selfish, but I was doing a massive disservice to myself and others. These books no longer represented joy. They represented unrealized potential and I knew it was time for most of them to go.
I realized that if you’re hanging onto something for no other reason than sentimentality or the thought that, “someday, I’ll need this,” you’re not realizing your fullest self. You’re living inauthentically.
It’s only when we strip away the possessions weighing us down that we can see clearly who we are and what we want to be. Tossing things for the sake of tossing them is a fruitless exercise, but I’d reached the point where my avalanche of books had made me stop loving something I’d once found great joy in. It was the right solution for me.
Getting rid of my excess books wasn’t easy, and it took time. I found myself stalling on purpose.
So I did what any reasonable OCD sufferer would do: I set a firm number for the maximum number of books I’d own. I began paring my collection down from well over 1,000 to 100 of the most essential books – a small number of which I would display for their aesthetic value, but a majority of which I would read and pass along until I owned very few of them then focus on reading solely on my Kindle.
The guy who runs the Boys and Girls Club of America donation trailer has gotten to know me well.
“More books?” he always asks when I drop off another storage container.
“Some good ones today,” I always tell him.
I’m not there yet. As of late July 2015, I’m down to a dwindling selection of 200 books. It’s an improvement that’s yielded an unexpected benefit. With the clutter gone, I’ve had a strong urge to read more. I read voraciously, at least two books a week now.
Suddenly, someday is now. I’d wanted to read Stephen King’s Cujo for nearly 30 years. With the extraneous removed from my life, I finally sat down and read it. Verdict? Decent, but I should have read it a long time ago when it was more my style. This is the danger of holding onto something for too long: it can spoil.
Newly energized in my reading, the only limit is my time, not my desire to collect more books only to squirrel them away in a box.
Another book that survived the cut is Thoreau’s Walden, which I’m currently re-reading. It’s the perfect palate cleanser in my journey to a place where, with each passing year, I accumulate less and less stuff. Maybe my grandkids will thank me someday.
***
James Ball is a former newspaper editor who lives in Northern Nevada with his wife and two sons. He wants to write as a way to help others—not just for work.
MLisa Harpool says
I’ve slowly been downsizing for 2 years. Last week I reduced my book collection by over 50%. My transaction turned them all into one very nice book at Half Price Books.
John Costigan says
There are few things I love more than reading. On of my favourite pastimes is to stop at a cafe and watch the world go by while reading a good book.
For a few bucks, a good book can give many hours of pleasure.
But I had accumulated many books over the years, and after a while they felt like a burdensome millstone.
The arrival of the Kindle with its e-ink display was a revolution for me. I have now given most of my hard copies to charity and have been gradually replacing them with electronic versions.
I still miss the experience of browsing a bricks and mortar bookshop, feeling the pages of the book in my hand, but my e-book reader allows me, for the weight of a hardback, to the bring my entire library with me.
Jennifer says
My book collection was the second thing to go after reading Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
I’m now down to less than 30 books and could probably pare that number further.
I don’t know the number of books I got rid of but it was taking away a big chunk of space in my barn and house. Some of the books had gotten moldy and had to be thrown out. I ended up taking at least two car loads to my local library.
I can’t describe how much freer and energetic I feel after having gotten rid of so many books.
Tina says
We had to throw out boxes of mildewed books from my mother’s condo when we moved her to a nursing home. Now I keep only art books and signed books. I have been taking books out of the library and getting second hand paperbacks for my mom to read. I have only 2 shelves of books now.
Karen says
Thought-provoking! Books are a weakness for me, but I, too, have been working on culling my collection to only those few books I love and re-read. My first step has been to collect all of my recent acquisitions and schedule reading time. There are a dozen books currently in my to read pile. When I finish a book, I take it immediately to the Friends of the Library or our neighborhood Little Library. My goal is to read all the books in my stack before the year’s end, so others may also enjoy them and learn from them before they are outdated. I’ve also been tackling the book boxes in the basement. To be frank, it’s mortifying to see the volumes I packed up and stored away with no thought to sharing with others. What on earth was I thinking?
Nathan Atkinson @ Quiet Habits says
This is great! Thanks for sharing your personal story about a minimalist journey. This can apply to so many things. When we remove the excess (or don’t get it at all) we can learn to appreciate what we do have to a greater extent. I’ve found this with books, shoes, clothes, electronic devices, online site memberships and more.
Millie says
This article is lovely, and mirrors my own experience of de-cluttering books (I’m only 28 though so haven’t reached my mid-life crisis yet :P).
However, I do wince when I see the Kindle mentioned. It often comes up in articles about de-cluttering books. However, I wonder how many people actually sort through their Kindle books every now and then and make sure they’re not keeping stuff that they don’t need on there. Kindles are great because they obviously hugely decrease the amount of physical space you need to store books, but keeping hundreds of books you’ll never read on your Kindle is just as bad as keeping the books physically in your house.
For what it’s worth, I do go through my Kindle a couple of times a year and sort through all the titles and delete anything I know I’m not going to read again. As a result, I don’t have millions of books on my Kindle and I can find anything I want quite quickly. And if I do read the same book more than a couple of times, I’ll by a paperback copy so that I have something to easily refer to.
Andrea says
Hi Millie! Same here. o/ I have a Kobo and I do this de-cluttering frequently. Actually, I delete the e-book from my device soon as I read it. And since the e-books here (I live in Brazil) are not so cheap, I don’t have too many.
My e-book collection is more organized than my printed book collection, I guess. :D
ericka says
I moved many times before my daughter was born. I got in a habit of leaving things in 18 gallon totes. I sympathized with the sentiment of packing and getting the extra books in the container.
Twenty years later and several trips to the chiropractor for my habit of lifting heavy things (landscaping, snow, book totes, furniture, people, etc) had me rethink my book addiction. I even dated a guy who worked at a bookstore! Once a year I make a pilgrimage to a book drop off at a collection site at a church with beautiful pond koi. It is meaningful. I get to visit the fish with my daughter. The books are sold to benefit a woman’s empowerment group (fees, scholarships). I am demonstrating to my daughter how to let things go. My decluttering of more than just books is ongoing. I have learned much about myself in the process. It gets easier to let go…of the books, the past, of expectations. And just be.
Z&Z says
Thank you. My children have too many books and I have been loath to purge their mostly unread books. This article helped me realize that that children, too, could be overwhelmed by too many choices in books. They both read and re-read the Calvin and Hobbes collection, and I am delighted when they share this time together. So, those we will keep. The rest will be set free (and so will we).
andy says
This is THE BIGGEST thing for me, I have about 5 bookcases full right now and would like to get it down 2 at most. I don’t expect to get more books, as I’ve been reading eBooks for a few years now.
But then I tell myself I paid money for them and it’s like throwing money away — even though most of them are used and were not more than a couple dollars each.
And I tell myself I could try selling them, but I’ve tried to list a bunch on Craigslist I thought would be popular, but got few offers.
And really I don’t care about making money off them…
No, at this point I just need to start letting them go, there’s a good chunk which are quite easy to get rid of. There’s a library box nearby that I’ve been stuffing occasionally, but getting rid of them that way would take forever. Some go to an independent local thrift store.
Oh, then there’s my huge classical music collection! All of which I have ripped onto hard drives (backed up 3X in separate locations), so I could get rid of all of that and wouldn’t lose the music. But still, a lot of those have more sentimental value than the books!
Andrea says
“But then I tell myself I paid money for them and it’s like throwing money away”
Andy, when I talk about getting rid of my books, my father’s number one concern always is: BUT YOU PAID [SO MUCH] MONEY ON THEM. And I didn’t know how to contradict that.
But now I think I got the answer. I like to think that I paid TO READ THE STORY not to own its printed (or eletronic) version. And it makes easier for me to decluttering my bookshelf.