The spring cleaning frenzy continues. I think my bedroom is now the least cluttered it’s been in at least five or six years. No more boxes on the floor, clothes on the boxes, piles of papers and junk on the desk, etc.
An essential part of this process has been throwing stuff out. A large part of the reason it gets so cluttered in the first place is that I run out of room to put things, so they get dumped on the floor or desk ‘temporarily’, to be sorted later on. And things get dumped on top of them. And then they get hidden by a blanket tossed off to the side. And so on… After throwing a lot of old junk out, I finally have some more room in which to put everything.
There’s one thing that I’ve been reluctant to throw out so far though, and that’s the books. My collection might not be that large compared to some people’s, but it’s still a fair amount of space. There’s a fairly wide variety, too: textbooks, technical manuals, paperbacks, comics, game manuals, reference guides, tutorials… I don’t really want to let *any* of them go. Throwing out a book almost seems sacrilegious somehow, as though I’m devaluing the very information contained therein.
Do I really need all of those books? Well, maybe… The textbooks for courses long since passed? I’ve already thrown out my own notes for those classes, but the books are somehow different. On occasion I actually have gone running back to them to check on some bit of information I vaguely remembered, so they are still occasionally useful. How about the paperbacks and comics? I do sometimes like to reread my favourites. Game manuals? Not really, but they take up the least space. Some of the computer books are fairly recent and still relevant, and I refer to them often. Others though, aren’t quite so up-to-date. Do I really need “The MC68000 Reference Guide” anymore? Almost certainly not.
In the end though, I’m really just too lazy to sort through them for the few I might actually get rid of and dispose of them properly, so for now I’ll just keep building my own little library here. I just need to get more bookshelves so I’m not forced to keep stuffing them in closets, in drawers, on top of desks, etc…
I know how you feel about the books. When I moved, I threw out a lot of books, magazines, etc to save space, and I kind of regret it. I don’t regret it because I necessarily used that information often. It’s mostly because I feel bad that I just tossed all that information like it meant nothing. So yeah. Keep your library and buy more bookshelves! :-)
Throw out all your Microsoft-related materials. The way I see it, they devalued their information long before printing it, so nothing you do to it would be the least bit sacrilegious. :-)