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I will admit, as I look around, I have so many books but who knows, I may read one of them today, home on a sick day and rather bored.
Magazine wise, though, I essentially decided that those like Av Week, AUSA's Army, USNI Proceedings, if they were over a year old, I was dumping them. Fate also intervened on my behalf and decades of Nat'l Geo were left behind in Operation:WHIRLWIND.
If anything, this overloaded state of books keeps me from buying more. I was in 1/2 Price the other week and kept my eyes wound in. I checked out the crime section, the bargain paperbacks, but only bought more blank journals..........
........of course, it helped that they had reorganized the store so it wasn't as friendly to me, too!
For several years before we retired, I chose books I'd not likely read again, put them in sacks by genre, then Freecycled them to other book lovers. We still brought half a POD of book boxes to the retirement location. We have seven bookshelves in the office and four in the great room.
But I made a rule, since we have zero space for more bookshelves: If something comes in, something has to leave. So a book purchase has to be balanced by something leaving that would leave shelf space for the new book. So far, we're more on the "something leaving" side, but there's still way too much stuff around here.
As presbyopia took hold, my e-reader became more important, as I can adjust the font size according to "good eye day" versus "bad eye day," so most new books are e-books. Still, I have many, many books that I am flat out not giving up.
Today, I realized we have been given a number of cookbooks that we've never even opened, so they're going to the library or thrift store. Freecycle doesn't work so well out here in the sticks...
Books are wonderful things. If the power and internet fails, I still have tons of entertainment -- as long as my magnifiers still work...
.........Books are wonderful things. If the power and internet fails, I still have tons of entertainment -- as long as my magnifiers still work...
Actually, it is the stuff supplied by power, the Net and TV, that I am trying to get away from with books.
Or, in another application of it, because there is no cable and hardly any Net out here, thank goodness for books.
As noted somewhere, yesterday was a sick day and I wasted a lot of it yesterday looking for some kind of contact on the Net......when I could have been reading. So last night, I pulled a sci fi paperback off the shelf, started reading that, to get lost in the worlds of otherwise. Well almost, got 4 pages before a cat interrupted me.
The point is, in relation to this thread, that I didn't realize till very late in the game that life out here would be without cable and without much of the Net. That had I not, by choice or otherwise, weened myself a lot off those features, I would have starved out here.
Look carefully at that "final" home and if it is something like, in reality or application, a remote beach house, it is good to have books.
When we moved to a condo in retirement, we whittled ourselves down to about 6 boxes of our most precious books we felt we couldn’t part with. Living in a condo, however, focused us on maximizing our living space to accommodate the things we really need over those we merely want. Rather than accumulate more books that we read once then store away, we both took up e-readers. After 6 years in our basement storage unit, we took our “precious“ books to Goodwill, so the others might enjoy them as much as we did. Rather than a sense of loss, it was freeing to let go of yet more belongings we felt at one time we couldn’t live without. Poof!
This attitude might be common, but not universal. To me, the physical book is a molding, dusty, asthma-inducing chunk of paper and fabric. The real magic is in the words - the story, the information.
Books were revered when they were super expensive and the most efficient way for information to pass from person to person. They replaced/supported storytellers and oral historians. Now we have more efficient means to store these words. Which is awesome, IMO. It definitely made my family's cross country move easier, cheaper, and less of a burden. I still have the same stories, they just weight hundreds of pounds less.
I see your point and have to agree. Books make me sad because I have such a difficult time reading most of them because of my wonky eyesight.
The line spacing in most books is just too close together for me. The sentences just want to blend and run together like streams running into lakes. My dad, an extremely avid reader all his life, had the same problem. He had to give up reading in his later years and it made him very depressed.
I am so fortunate that unlike my dad, I live in the wonderful age of e-readers. I can adjust the line spacing on my Kindle Fire. I can put my Kindle White in my purse and take it with me everywhere. I can store thousands of books on them. I can do so much on these devices but best of all I can continue to read. I wish my dad would have had this opportunity.
So when I had to give up the hundreds of books I owned when I moved cross crountry I did miss them. But I was able to give them up without actually losing them because I was able to transfer the stories they told onto a medium on which I was able to use to enjoy them again.
Buy you books for an iPad and then adjust the font size!
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