Okay, I have a problem. I have too many books and not enough house.
I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, and a recent post on Faith and Family Live inspired me to jump in. See, it’s getting bad around here. Not only do we have my huge collection of novels, plays, spiritual tomes, books on writing, and French stories that I used to be able to read easily but now keep around mostly because they look cool, along with my husband’s assortment of books on theology, Church history, programming, and home repair, we also now have my boys’ books.  Together they have amassed a very impressive collection, considering that they cannot even read.
We are so desperate for shelf space that I have even started doing the reader’s equivalent of double-parking:
Oh, and factor in all the books from my own childhood that I am emotionally unable to part with, and we’re really in a bind. Shortly before Matthew was born, I had a brilliant idea: Wait a minute! I can put the books from my own childhood in the baby’s room! At that time we did not know the gender of our little one.  I figured that if it turned out to be female, she’d have a library that would be the envy of every one of her girly, ballet-loving friends. But destiny had other plans, and I suspect it is only a few years before Matthew summarily kicks A Little Princess out of his room. Sara Crewe is living on borrowed time.
On the other hand, it could be worse. If you have to have a huge collection of something, books show a bit better than, say, beer cans. They are easier to store than mounted animal heads (I am assuming).  And every book means something to me. It’s a little artifact of my childhood, preserved forever; it’s that novel I read in my twenties that helped me figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be; it’s the spiritual memoir that got me through an existential crisis caused by a romance gone wrong; it’s the writing guide full of prompts that just might get me running down a road towards a fabulous book idea. How do I part with them?
Do I even need to?
Please say no.
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