In which Jane Rule helps me downsize my book collection

“It’s not that I’m possessive of much that I own, more that I felt required to give them a home or find another for them where the stories that surround them can be told again, where new stories might be attracted to or by them.” –Jane Rule, from her essay “Things” in the 2008 collection Loving the Difficult published by Hedgerow Press.

I am a book hoarder: I keep books even if I know I will never read them again. Despite many recent efforts to curtail this habit, I’m fearful that my entire life is going to look like this one day:

And while an overflowing used bookstore is a lovely place to spend a few hours getting lost in if you have the time, it is really inconvenient if you have to find anything specific in it, or if it becomes your entire life.

I am trying to learn to give my books away. Like Rule, I want them to go “where the stories that surround them can be told again, where new stories might be attracted to or by them.” Rule gave her books to family members and friends who visited her. I do this when I have a book I know someone else will enjoy. But most people I know are in the same boat: they live in apartments and move often, and they take pains to ensure an uncluttered life.

Enter Bookcrossing, a social site that “makes the world a library, and lets you follow the progress of the books you give away. When you register a copy of a book on the site, you have a chance to write a journal entry recording whatever you think is significant about a book before “releasing” it to either a friend or a total stranger. If you’re lucky, other people will also go to the site and and use the ID number you inscribe inside the front cover to record how the book came to them and what they thought of it.

Unless they’re a fellow Bookcrosser, there’s a good chance they won’t: I’ve only had a few books with more than one entry. One was called Missing Sarah, about one of the women who went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It was found by a homeless person who collects books, and a friend of his logged into the site to write about it. The book was passed around to several different people: much better than sitting on my shelf unread.

There’s a site I tried recently called Bookmooch, where members can list books for trade. It was satisfying to clear out a bunch of books I wasn’t going to read, but even though each book was going to someone who really wanted it, it was harder for me to send them off. I think that if I listed each book on Bookcrossing, recording how it came to me and where I was when I read it, and gave other people the chance to do the same, it would be easier to send it off to a Bookmoocher. I would feel like I still had something to show for what I’d read, which is my main motivation for hoarding.

I haven’t been active on Bookcrossing in a few years, so going back and seeing the books I released brought back some memories. I don’t actually feel the need to reread any of those books, but I liked looking back and remembering where I was when I read them, what was going on in my life that led me to them. It’s just like browsing my bookshelf, except my Bookcrossing profile page doesn’t take up several square feet of precious floor space or cost several hundred dollars to ship across the country.

I don’t have the books anymore, but I still have the stories.