This post was originally going to be a comment to this post from my beloved sister, but I think it grew to a size proper to be posted on my own blog.
My sister just recently decided to cull her library at home, because she just has too many. Some people if you told them you were throwing away a book, regardless of the book itself, would look at you like you just said that you were going eat a baby. With ketchup.
These people need to get over themselves, because
Books were cherished, precious items back in the 1200's when books were bound by hand with paper imported from faraway places and each and every one was handwritten. Probably cost as much a war horse.
There were also cherished in the 18th and 19th century, when printing presses reduced the cost from a warhorse to maybe a few heads of cattle.
Now between the interwebs and the fact that someone can buy a trade paperback of Paris Hilton's memoirs for about the same price as a Quizno's Sub, they're pretty much disposable.
I took out two large shopping bags of books to Half Priced Books before I left the 'Burgh and got about ten bucks for them. even without the cash, it was worth not having to drag them across 6 states.
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Certainly there's a lot of crap getting printed (good lord, they'll let just ANYONE publish a book with someone else's money these days). But there's a transportational power to a really good, absorbing novel, the kind that you stay up way past your bedtime to finish, the kind you're still thinking about two days later... But THOSE were not the books I threw away. Even among the classics of literature that I pitched, not one of them particularly gripped me, and I figure if I ever want to go back to Dostoyevsky... it's not like Crime and Punishment is ever going out of print, eh? So if it was a crappy paperback that I was never realistically going to read again, out it went.
And of course, there are a couple of paperback classics sitting here in a box, waiting for a trip to the Post Office.
Thats why you only purchase books that you like and mean something to you.
Well, part of the reason for the size of my collection is that my high school expected us to purchase our textbooks, much like college. So I had a huge collection of stuff from four years of high school English, plus college classes. Very few of the books that hit the curb were books I had purchased for my own enjoyment.
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