Getting Rid of Books, Making Space for Life

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little too beholden to my stuff. Mostly this is because we’re thinking about moving to a trendier area of Vancouver from our spacious suburban apartment, which of course means a smaller square footage. But it’s also because I looked around our apartment and realized how much of our space is taken up storing books that could be used for any number of other things. Living, for example.

This used to just be for books. Now it’s for books, and records, the guest book from our wedding, and gifts we treasure from people we love. Now it’s for our whole lives.

This weekend, we combed through our bookshelves for books to get rid of and came up with, well, tons of them. Three boxes full of them, easily. (It’s good timing, as we are donating them to Event Magazine‘s annual book sale fundraiser — support your local literary magazine!) And rather than feeling like I had lost old friends, I looked around our apartment at the bookshelf we could now donate to the SPCA charity shop and the space we were regaining and felt lighter. Happier. We had cleared enough space by shedding books to build a little reading nook in our living room, to hang art that had been waiting for a wall for ages, to shelve all our vinyl in alphabetical order, to install inserts into our Ikea Expedit that let us display some of the precious things that have been tucked away for far too long, and even leave an empty shelf for room to grow — maybe to add books, but maybe to buy more records or maybe to display something else entirely.

If you get rid of books, you’ll have more room for cats.

For too much of my life I have bought into the notion that my books are who I am. Indeed, as an English prof and book blogger married to the son of an antiquarian bookseller, it can sometimes feel like books are all I am. I used to wait for people to look through my book collection when they visited, pleased when the range and depth surprised them and silently judgemental when they didn’t look at all. It’s embarrassing to me now to think I ever determined whether or not people were worthwhile by how much interest they took in my bookshelves.