Too Many Books?

As always, I'll have to ask you to pardon my absence. Life has been mildly out of control lately what with an unexpected return of a friend, buying a new car, having a job, and other such diversions. This is all not to mention my massive weekend book buying insanity and subsequent shelf reorganization. As it turns out, attempting to organize 1000 books or so is a time consuming task that slurped up every last bit of my weekend. Nonetheless, I've temporarily triumphed over the unwieldy book collection and determined that I simply must start being much more disciplined in my book acquiring or maybe, at least, disciplined at all. But who wants to start out a blog post talking about discipline? Let's talk about the shiny new books I got and dole out a little blame instead. I promise I'll only write about a few of them, or else we might be here all day.

So - some of the highlights of library booksale fest Winter 2010 and the bloggers who made me buy them:


Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese - With thanks to Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.



The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar - Another one for Diane!




Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters - Thanks to Eva of A Striped Armchair who can always be counted upon to add to my TBR pile!

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri - Wendy at Caribousmom wrote a great review of this one.

Veil of Roses by Laura Fitzgerald - With thanks to the raving Susan of West of Mars. Having read Fat Kid Rules the World now, when she raves, I purchase!




To Serve Them All My Days by R.F. Delderfield - I definitely would have passed over this undustjacketed massive tome if I hadn't recalled Bookfool's glowing review.

A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest Gaines - Sam at Book Chase wrote a great review that propelled this one off the shelf and into my hands.

Others with no specific blame to lay include:

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

...and much much more. Should I continue I would only shame myself with my great indiscretion. In light of this, I finally decided that I had too many books. So I decided to weed out the book collection and unload some dead weight that it's time to admit that I'm never going to read. The good news is, all the books fit on the shelves now. The bad news? Well, um, they're kind of double layered. Okay, really double layered. But two weekend days later, they are in alphabetical order by author. Which was an epic chore, but also greatly satisfying, and I'm pretty sure I got a great workout without really thinking about it. Even with all of them carefully tucked into their places on the shelves, the unavoidable truth is that there are, in fact, too many. I fear it may be time to institute the sort of book buying ban that some of you with stronger wills than I have instituted. I have yet to decide on the rules I'll put in place for myself, just that I need to have some rules. After a week like the last one (or, dare I say, two?), I fear that one of the most basic easier-said-than-done rules I need to abide by is to, um, actually crack a book once in a while. *sigh*