No, not sick of reading. I’m in the midst of reading two different books, one print book and one e-books. Actually, it’s 3 books. There’s one other one out in the sunroom that I’ve almost given up on. Maybe I’ll read a little more in that. And, when I’m done with these two, or three, I’ll transition into two more. Wait, it’s four. There’s also the book I read in the mornings for devotions.
No, not sick of writing books. This last week I finished the first chapter in my next Bible study. I enjoyed doing it, though after almost two months of writing nothing due to my health problems. And the two months before that I was writing at reduced capacity due to the two freak injuries I had in mid-July. So I’m having to get re-used to taking a portion of my day for writing. And working through my fine motor skills for typing. Yes, re-learning the elements of being an author.
No, what I’m sick of about books is selling them. You see, in the interest of a future downsizing, which after this year of health problems is much closer than we though, we decided to make a big dent in the 2 or 3 thousand books in our house.
That includes what I’ve been calling my legacy books, or more properly termed heirloom books. These include a large number of books published in the 1800s. This has been a lot of work. Looking up the books at on-line sales sites, deciding on a price, placing an ad on Facebook Marketplace, fielding queries, scheduling buyers in, dealing with no-shows, etc. It’s a lot of work.
I could also say gathering books from various places in the house. We had many boxes of books on shelves in the basement storeroom. Lynda was the one to identify the boxes and carry them upstairs (since I wasn’t allowed to go on stairs after my operation). Our daughter, Sara, also helped carry books upstairs while she was here. The basement is now much cleared of books. Yet, the bookshelves in the basement living room still have lots of books. We have no shortage of building material.
The garage worktable is covered by boxes of Christian novels, mainly for women. The dining room table is covered with boxes of misc. books, a cross between legacy and modern books. All those are for sale. Then we have boxes of books in the living room and dining room that Lynda hasn’t yet made the keep/get rid of decision. We also have a pile of books on the hearth, waiting for the buyer to pick up, and another, smaller pile near of books we have decided to keep but haven’t yet looked where to reshelve them.
Why not just give the books away, you ask? It may come to that, especially with the modern ones. But for the legacy books, it seems a shame to not first try to get something for them. Some of them have been in the family for 130 years—first on bookshelves of some kind in the houses David Sexton rented, later in boxes in the boxes in the basement of the house I grew up in in Cranston, Rhode Island, then finally on the bookshelves or in boxes in our house. All that storage and transporting deserves compensation, don’t you think?
At some point, the inventory will be small enough that donation will be more likely. Or the few that are left will be manageable to keep. We’ve already done that with children’s books, 400 of them donated to our church for a special event.
But at some point, I’ll be glad for the dining room table to be clear, the living room clear, and the garage clear of book boxes and loose books to be gone, either sold, donated, or re-shelved.