What to do when you have too many books March 14, 2011

A couple days ago, someone told me that their office was having a book drive. I took a look at my own bookshelf, and the adjoining shelves that had been taken over with books, and my collapsing pile of magazine back-issues, and decided that I should make a donation.

Now, when I say they are “my” books, I really mean they belong to “my husband and I,” so this was a joint project. In fact, my husband was the impetus for this post, being as when we finished the project he explicitly asked me if I was going to post about it, and seemed disappointed at the idea that I would not. Since I like to keep him relatively happy, I decided to write a post about pruning your bookshelf.

Cleaning out your bookshelf can be difficult. Many people look at the contents of their bookshelf as an expression of who they are. “I am a person who studied Anthropology in college.” “I am a person who has read the classics.” “I am a person who is really into sci-fi.” Books can also hold memories – they’re gifts, they’re great stories, they’re full of characters who got us through lonely times, they’re companions on vacations and trips to the beach.

Books can also be a tremendous source of clutter, spilling off shelves and taking up space in rooms and on surfaces that were not designed to house book collections. When you have more books than you have bookshelf, it’s time to pare down your collection. If you have more books than you can appropriately store, then you have too many books.

Because book collections can be so personal, it’s hard to direct a person as to what to keep and what to get rid of. Here are a few basic guidelines:

If you have more than one copy, get rid of the duplicates.
If you have a more recent edition, get rid of the obsolete one.
If it’s in bad condition (pages stuck together, waterlogged, etc), get rid of it.
If it’s outdated (financial advice from the late ‘80’s, baseball card values from the mid-90’s), get rid of it.
If you can’t use it anymore (pregnancy advice when your youngest is in junior high), get rid of it.
If you won’t use it anymore (diet book for a plan that didn’t work for you), get rid of it.

If you didn’t like it, get rid of it. It’s not like you’re going to read it again.
If it’s not yours, give it back.

Except for the books that are really outdated or in bad condition, you can donate the remainder to a charity or to your local library, or take them to a second-hand shop and sell them to the owner. It’s sometimes easier to part with a book knowing that someone else will read it down the line.

If there’s still not enough room on your bookshelf to hold what remains, you need to pare down further. Here’s the next round of questions:

Am I holding this for someone else? If so, give it to them, and tell them they can keep it when they are done. If you are holding a book because you think your children might want to read it, you need to put some thought into that. Is the book going to be unavailable when they want their own copy? How close is your child to reading this? If your kid is a year old and the book is for teenagers, chances are they’ll be reading an e-copy when the time comes. Is your child really going to read this book, or are you holding onto it because it reminds you of your own childhood? I’m not against keeping a book simply because it has memories attached to it, but you can only use this excuse to the extent that you have the space for it.

Am I only keeping this because it’s part of a set? Sets of books take up a lot of space. Anyone who has a full collection of Baby-Sitters Club books will tell you this. But there’s no value in giving that much space to a set of books just because they’re a set. If you’ve read the whole series and you’re not going to re-read it, think long and hard about how much you want to keep it. You can free up a lot of space quickly by deciding to remove an entire series of books from your shelf. Likewise, it’s not a requirement to keep the previous books in a series while you wait for the next one to come out. You may want to, but you don’t have to.

Am I ever going to read this again? Most people only read a book once. If you’re the kind of person who re-reads favorites, get rid of the books that will never make the re-readable favorite list, for whatever reason. Summer beach-reads, “chick lit,” and mystery novels tend to fall into this category. I know there are some books that you don’t intend to re-read that you’ll want to keep for whatever reason, but if a particular one is not tugging at you and begging to be kept, get rid of it.

Have I opened this book since I was in college? Many people hang on to old schoolbooks, saying they are “for reference” or simply on the justification that they were expensive. If you are keeping a book for reference, ask yourself how often you actually refer to it. If you went to college more than a few years ago, chances are whatever book you are keeping is full of outdated information and you couldn’t use it if you wanted to. If your life took you somewhere dramatically different than your studies intended, it’s even less likely that you will ever crack those textbooks open again. I know you spent a lot of time with them, and I know you paid a lot for them. I also know that if you don’t use them, they’re not much more than dust collectors, and they can go.

Do I use this book? If your bookshelf is full of reference materials, cookbooks, and manuals, you need to look at each one and consider whether you actually refer to it. I had a huge stash of cookbooks, mostly given as gifts, but over the past few years I’ve found that I only used about half of them. There was no reason to hold on to the rest. You also do not need to hold on to manuals for products you no longer have or activities you no longer enjoy. If you spent a few years fixing up an old car, then sold said car and never intend to fix up another one, you can safely dispose of the car-repair books. If you have books relating to a home improvement project that you’ve long since completed, you don’t need to hold on to the how-to advice. The work is done.

Hopefully by now you’ve been able to pare down to what will fit on your bookshelf. If not, then we’re on to the harder questions:

Am I keeping this because it’s “a classic?” I know they look nice on your bookshelf. I have books that I keep because “they’re classics.” But at least pare down to the classics that you liked. If you loved The Great Gatsby, leave it on the shelf. If you hated it, take it off.

Am I keeping this because it was a gift? If someone gave you a book to read, and you read it, you’re free to get rid of it. If someone gave you a book to read, and you have no intention of ever reading it, then you should definitely get rid of it. If they notice it’s missing from your shelf (and chances are they won’t), just tell them that you finished it and donated it.

Am I ever really going to read this? Maybe you bought a few books to take on vacation and never got around to reading that last one. Maybe you impulse-bought something about starting your own home garden and then decided that gardening was not for you. Maybe you started a book and found yourself completely disinterested three chapters in. Whatever the reason may be, you’re holding on to something that you’re never going to use. Getting rid of something you’re not going to read is especially difficult if you think it’s something you “should” read, but I promise not to rat you out if you pitch that copy of “Madame Bovary.”

Am I keeping this because I like the author’s other works? Not everything that everyone writes is good. If you buy every Stephen King book the day it comes out, that doesn’t mean that you have to keep them all when you’re done reading them. In fact, you don’t have to keep any of them. If you are going to keep some, though, only keep the ones you liked.

Am I trying to make a statement with my bookshelf? How does this book contribute to that statement? Secretly, this is what it all comes down to for a lot of people. They think of their bookshelf as a display piece, something that says something about who they are and what they know. If that’s the case, then look through your collection and weed out anything that doesn’t fit your current statement. What does that copy of “The Nanny Diaries” say about you? Does it contribute to the narrative you’re trying to build? How about that sci-fi collection? Leftover from high school and you haven’t read an Arthur C. Clarke novel in years? Maybe it’s time to move that collection on to a new owner.

At the very least, the statement your bookshelf makes shouldn’t be “I have too many books.”

168 hours and 100 Dreams January 30, 2011

So I started reading 168 Hours, and as much as I didn’t want to do it, the author of course suggests right off the bat tracking your time for a week to see how you really spend it. I started yesterday morning, and so far I am not annoyed by the practice, but I’m sure it will get old quick. I also think that it would be of value to track more than one week in order to come up with a sort of average, so I will probably be doing this for awhile.

In one day, I’ve made 2 observations. One is that a lot of the time, I am doing more than one thing. Luckily this shouldn’t be too difficult to track because often the two things fall into the same larger category – for example, laundry and cleaning up in the kitchen. Those are both “household” activities. Sometimes, though, I am doing two unrelated things – like cooking dinner and talking to Dave. I’m not sure how I will categorize this kind of stuff.

I’ve also noticed that I am already trying to mess with my time allocations. I spend less time on the internet because I don’t want to write down that I was surfing the web for an hour in the middle of the day. This may not be a bad thing, though, since it makes me more conscious of what I am doing with my time.

(As a side note, I have also noticed that the author has some of the same annoying writing habits that I do. They are certainly annoying, and I apologize to you all for that.)

There are a few other exercises that I’ve already gotten to. One of these is the “100 Dreams” list, which is also pretty necessary if you’re going to try and apply the rest of the book to your life. I would recommend taking a few minutes to try this one out, even if you’re not all that interested in managing your 168 hours, because it was an interesting exercise and gives a good amount of insight into yourself. The basic idea is to write down 100 things you want to accomplish. Some can be things you have already done – mine included graduating from college, owning a home, and having children. Others can be big goals – I have visiting all 50 states, taking a family vacation to Europe, and paying off all my consumer debt. You can also include smaller dreams, maybe things you could accomplish in short order, such as having an awesome shoe collection, reading the newspaper every Sunday, or writing in a journal three times a week. Once you have the list together, look for common themes. Is your list mostly about family, education, travel, financial goals? These themes will, according to the author, guide you as to how to best spend your 168 hours (among other things).

Anyway, if you have a few minutes this week, write down your 100 Dreams and see what the list tells you. Show it to someone else if you’d like and see what themes they see in your list. Then take some time to think about what you are doing, and what you cold be doing, to make your dreams come true.

Hoarders, etc. January 26, 2011

A lot of people ask me about hoarding, and do I watch Hoarders (I do, religiously), and recently a few people have asked me if I’ve read Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. I can now report that I have read it, and it was very interesting.

I should probably preface this entire piece by saying that I am not in any sense clinically trained and I have no educational or professional background in psychology aside from AP psych in high school and 2 college courses to complete my science requirement. Just so you know.

I don’t know that I agree with the idea that all hoarders are sick, or that they are all sick in the same way. Most psychologists seem to lump compulsive hoarding in with OCD and anxiety disorders. I see a few problems with this. One is the success of exposure therapy in treating OCD symptoms. There has been great progress in guiding people with OCD to face their fears, allowing them to progress into more and more anxiety-producing situations until their fear or compulsion is conquered. Yet with the treatment of hoarders, the conventional wisdom is that this type of treatment will not work. It’s generally agreed that a forced cleanout will cause additional stress, possible breakdown, and ultimately lead to the hoarder re-filling their home with stuff, possibly to a greater degree than before. So I find it a bit odd that we can treat fears and compulsions with exposure therapy – except this one. That, to me, says that hoarding is somehow different.

The second issue is that the hoarders I have read about and seen on TV are not all the same. If you watch Intervention, or The Biggest Loser, or any show about different people overcoming a common challenge, there is a common thread between them. In some sense, these people share the same story. With hoarders, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Some show hoarding behavior from the time they are young. Some can point to a life event – usually some sort of loss – as a trigger. Some hoard items indiscriminately while others hoard specific categories of items with a specific purpose. Some are very outgoing and social and some are very lonely and closed-off. Some hoarders seem completely incapable of making decisions. Some are much much cleaner than others. There’s no common story. I don’t think these people have a common illness. I think some have OCD or anxiety disorders. Some have a disorder that makes decision-making difficult. Some have paranoia or control issues. Some are traumatized. Some are depressed. These are all very different mental problems – they just happen to be expressing them in similar ways.

And yes, I do think some of them are just lazy. I think that by the time your situation is bad enough to merit inclusion on a television show you’ve probably progressed beyond lazy to overwhelmed and scared and desperate and probably depressed, but in some cases I do think it starts out as sheer laziness.

There are still a few things that I don’t understand about hoarders. I don’t understand why, if their possessions are so precious, they don’t treat them well. They don’t store things properly, they bury their treasures under mounds of stuff, they let things rot or mold or break. A hoarder with dozens of carefully arranged curios of figurines makes sense to me. A hoarder with half-crushed boxes of mixed items that they can’t easily access does not. This goes double for animal hoarders.

I don’t understand why the people on TV – especially the doctors, who I would assume are mandatory reporters – don’t call child and animal welfare services more often. There was one episode of Hoarders where they did call child services, and it was a big deal. The thing was, it was not by any stretch the worst house with children in it that was featured on the show. Why did they call then and not other times? (Sub-question, goes to mental illness: Why was the parents’ response to this to try and stop the show rather than to change the situation so that the home was fit for the children? Their solution was to let things stay as they were, i.e. unfit for the childrens’ well-being (a point they agreed with!), and let their children continue to live in that environment, rather than change the situation so that their children had a safe home. That’s a huge mis-prioritization that I see over and over with hoarding stories. People know how bad the situation is – they know that child services, adult services, animal services, and the housing inspector are threatening to make the worst happen, but they still don’t act to change their situation. They misplace their anger at the government agency. They choose the unhealthy situation over the healthy solution. It’s a lack of ability to prioritize and make decisions and see the big picture.)

I also don’t understand the filth. Not all hoarders are filthy, but a good number are. Sometimes it’s a function of the hoard – mold that can’t be seen or treated, dust that can’t be reached, floors that can’t be vacuumed. But often times, there is a mess on top of this. Animals that are not cleaned up after, ash trays that are not emptied, garbage – that the hoarder knows and agrees is garbage – not removed from the house on trash day. What gives? What is it about hoarding that makes you unable to wipe up a spill or empty a litter box? I don’t understand that.

So that’s kind of my high-level thoughts on the whole hoarding phenomenon. I could probably write more on it, but at some point I have to get back to my day job.