The Magicians, Lev Grossman

Whoa, how did I not review this yet?  I thought I had – but apparently I only thought about it, A LOT, and then forgot to do it because I was reading through the Amelia Peabody books.  (Still fun!)

The Magicians is about a boy called Quentin Coldwater who is obsessed with a series of books about a fictional land, Fillory.  One day, he interviews for and gets into a school of magic, Brakebills, and he spends the next lots of years learning magic, and practicing magic, and eventually (is this spoilers?  I feel like no, because you see it coming from the beginning) it turns out that Fillory was real all along, and he and his friends go to Fillory.

I loved the Fillory thing.  Narnia obviously informed the idea of the Fillory books – the child protagonists, the magic alternate world, the talking animals, etc. – but very rarely did it feel like Grossman was borrowing too much from C.S. Lewis.  (The exception is that he swiped the entire idea of the Wood Between the Worlds with hardly any changes, which kind of bugged me.)  Mainly, though, this device works very well.  The idea of the book is sort of a growing-up of children’s fantasy.  Quentin’s obsession with Fillory makes him expect one thing out of magic, and he finds it works quite differently.  He grows into adulthood and cannot quite work out what to do with his life, and finally he gets to Fillory and finds it absolutely not what he was imagining.  It’s all pretty dark and difficult and messy, like adulthood is – the expectations kids have, and the difficult, compromise-y reality.

(Spoilers here.)  What worked particularly nicely for me, in suggesting the transition from childhood magic to the world of adulthood, is the episode where Quentin decides to play a tiny prank on one of his teachers.  The minor distraction he creates summons a Beast from another world, and a student who tries to save the situation gets killed.  BAM.  It was effective.

On the down side, I did find the book unbearably self-conscious at times, especially on the one or two occasions that the students of Brakebills made reference to Hogwarts and Middle Earth.  It was jarring.  Fillory was fictional Narnia, so the world of the book was obviously not our world; to make reference to a real-world book took me right out of the moment.  If there is Fillory instead of Narnia, Tolkien and Harry Potter can’t exist.  Does that make sense?

Another problem I had was that, although the book was a good exploration of the adulthood thing I mentioned before, it wasn’t tightly plotted.  Extraneous events and stories were easily distinguishable from plot point events and stories because Grossman was telegraphing his punches like mad.  Plus, the trip to Fillory didn’t happen until ages into the book, and it was so brief there wasn’t enough time to build up the necessary suspense.  (Though I did like the final revelation about Martin.)

I spoke a while ago about Neil Gaiman’s story “The Problem of Susan” and the problems I had with it.  Grossman’s story is as creepily effective as Gaiman’s at growing up the Narnia books, without being as disrespectful to Lewis’s writing.  On the other hand, given that it was novel-length rather than just a short story, The Magicians could have benefited by having a good editor.  It was uneven altogether – it dragged in bits, and raced in bits, and while some things worked spectacularly, others spectacularly did not (the niffin thing?  not so much).

I like for my life to be simple, and I have fretted about how many stars to give this book for a while now.  I decided on three as an average, though as I say, in parts it was a five and in parts a one or two.  What would you prefer – an all-bad book you can write off forever, or a book like this that’s inconsistent?

Other reviews: A Novel Menagerie, She Is Too Fond of Books, bookshelves of doom, OF Blog of the Fallen, Reading the Leaves, Books and Movies, Beyond Books, The Wertzone, The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Book Review, Darque Reviews, Wordsmithonia, Strategist’s Personal Library, Stephanie’s Written Word, and tell me if I missed yours!

Bonfire Night

I like a bonfire!  Sadly, the American fall holiday is Halloween, which does not entail bonfires.  Candy, yes.  Slutty costume versions of really strange things like bumblebees, yes.  But no sparklers, very few sausages, and rarely fireworks or bonfires.  And no burning effigies at all, unless Bonfire Night happens to coincide with the Bama game.

Whenever Bonfire Night rolls around, I get nostalgic for the Little Grey Rabbit books.  Did anyone else read these?  They are charming – all about a rabbit and a hare and a squirrel that live together and have little adventures.  In one book they go to the ocean; in one there is a young fairy that gives Grey Rabbit an egg; in one they have a birthday party for Grey Rabbit, and Wise Owl swallows her thimble.  In one book, Hedgehog says that his little son, Fuzzypeg, is very smart.  Hedgehog says, “He told me once I was a quadruped, and I said No!  I’m a plain hedgehog.  Plain I am and plain I’ll be, but my Fuzzypeg, he’s a scholard.”

One of the Grey Rabbit books is about Guy Fawkes Day.  Hare sneaks into town and gets the cat in a village shop to give him fireworks, which is exactly the kind of thing Hare would do.  Wise Owl sings a song about gunpowder treason, and they light Catherine wheels.  The wicked Fox, who at one point tried to eat Speckledy Hen all up, creeps away because he is Guy Fox and doesn’t want to get burned all up on top of the bonfire.

At Easter I always want to read this one picture book, The Easter Bunny that Overslept; at Christmas it’s The Story of Holly and Ivy.  We’re still a ways off from “the holiday season”, but I am curious now: what are some books you like to read at the holidays?

(You like how I am cunningly getting book recommendations from you?  Subtly varying my questions to elicit more and more suggestions for comfortable rereadable books?)

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale

I was determined to finish this book before the end of Halloween which I have now done.  This is my bonus book to wrap up the RIP Challenge, which, along with everyone else, I thank Carl for hosting.  I’ve had fun reading all my spooky books and reading what everyone else thought of spooky books they read.  Lots of Shirley Jackson.  Lots of Wilkie Collins.  These are the books I read:

Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger
I’m Looking Through You, Jennifer Finney Boylan
The Seance, John Harwood
Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn

and this one, my bonus one; and I liked Her Fearful Symmetry best.  Obviously.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is about Victorians and detectives and manor house mysteries.  I like all of these things, though murder mysteries tend to be dramatically more fun when they are fictional.  In its essentials, this book is about a three-year-old boy who gets taken from his bedroom and his throat slit – though as the author notes at the end, the search for the resolution to this mystery distances us from the child, rather than making us think about him.

As a person who appreciates detectives and their ability to solve mysteries, I wanted more triumphs for the eponymous Mr. Whicher!  In fact altogether more Mr. Whicher!  I liked it at the beginning when Kate Summerscale – good name, eh? – was telling us all about the clever things that Mr. Whicher did.  I was saddish after the Victorian public decided that they didn’t like Mr. Whicher after all, despite his being extremely clever.

I don’t like the Victorian public.  They’re jerks!  They turned on Oscar Wilde in similar fashion, like rabid wolves!  Despite his being extremely clever also.  I am going onward to read some stories and watch some TV about people who are clever, and people who talk fast.  I talk incredibly fast, and I like it when other people talk fast, and that’s why, despite the obvious flaws of both, I remain fond of The Gilmore Girls and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  (But not West Wing – can anyone explain to me why The West Wing is in any way enjoyable?  I’ve found it so boring when I’ve seen it in the past!)

Other reviews of Mr. Whicher: an adventure in reading, things mean a lot, Farm Lane Books Blog, Savidge Reads, Stuck in a Book, Caribou’s Mom, my cozy book nook, A Book A Week, As Usual I Need More Bookshelves, Semicolon, The Bookling, Scribbles, Medieval Bookworm, Sandy Nawrot, Literary License, Lesa’s Book Critiques, Thoughts of Joy, Crime Scraps, A Writer’s Pen, 1 More Chapter, and let me know, won’t you, if I missed yours?

I love my grandmother

All of them actually.  I have three.  Because I’m just lucky like that.  And they are all fantastic in different ways.  But in this case I am referring to my mother’s mother.  For one thing she is beautiful – we are always inspecting her wedding pictures and things when we come to visit her, and then we tell her that she is more beautiful than Ingrid Bergman.   And she laughs at us but dude, it is so true.  Ingrid Bergman would cry like a little girl and slap on gallons of makeup if she saw how beautiful Grammy was on her wedding day.

Grammy loves books and old movies, and she is always telling us what we should read and watch.  She tells us about Lauren Bacall and how hot she was with Humphrey Bogart, and she does impressions for us.  “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” she says in a sultry voice.  She tells us how Forever Amber was one of those books good Catholics weren’t supposed to read, when she was a girl, but she had a friend who read it anyway.  She tells us how the nuns at her school used to sell rosaries and prayer cards at recess, and she used to tease them.  “Look at this necklace!  Look how pretty!” she would say, trying on a rosary, and the nun said gravely, “Oh my dear, that isn’t a necklace; don’t you know, that’s a rosary,” and Grammy said, “Oh Sister.  I have not yet embraced the One True Faith.”

Every Christmas Grammy sends us books, and she writes in them, “To Jenny, Christmas 2008, with lots of love from Grammy xoxoxo”.  One year – this was amazing – she sent me all of Edward Eager’s books.  All of them, in a big package, and she wrote inside them all, “To Jenny with love from Grammy and Grandpa, Christmas 1995, xoxo”.  She never forgets to put the kisses and hugs, and if you’re around when she’s thinking about them, she sings, “A lot of kisses on the bottom – you’ll be glad you got ‘em”.  She likes to sing while she is doing stuff, in an extra-dramatic voice.  “Rose,” she sings, folding laundry.  “Of Washington Squaaaaaare!”

This is the side of my family that really appreciates small details.  My aunt Fayne (my godmother!) used to always send us cards with confetti inside, in the shape of cows, or birthday cakes, or whatever it was relating to the card she would send.  My uncle Jimmy, who is a very cool painter, one time had a show, and my mother overheard someone saying, “Look!  I can see the face of Jesus in the soup spoon!” which my mother reported, giggling, to Uncle Jim. And he was all, “Yeah.  I put Jesus in the soup spoon.”

I’m bringing this up because I just read The Mummy Case, the third of the Amelia Peabody mysteries, and the copy I’m reading is a lovely hardback given to me by my grandmother for Christmas last year.  This is the first time I’ve read it, and I discovered as I went along that she had put one-dollar bills inside the book at intervals.  This is exactly the kind of treat that is so completely Grammy – it’s not the money, it’s the surprise.  And I felt all snuggly and affectionate and had to let y’all know, my grandmother?  AMAZING.

P.S. Her parents were amazing too.  Like the most amazing people ever.  My Nanny lived to be five days shy of 100, and still every time we visited her she would say to my mother, “Come over here and sit on my lap, honey,” and my mother would say, “Nanny!  No!  I’ll smoosh you!” and Nanny would look surprised and say “No you won’t!”  And my great-grandfather that I never met read Rafael Sabatini and P.C. Wren, and one time carved a little monkey out of a peachpit and put it on a chain.  I wish I had met him.  He sounds like he would have been the best great-grandfather in the whole world.

P.P.S. Do I include Oscar Wilde in that “whole world” business?  YES I DO.  Did Oscar Wilde read Beau Geste and carve monkeys out of peachpits?  Didn’t think so.

Some books I have read before

REREADING IS AMAZING.  Sometimes I forget how many amazing books I have already read, because I am busy reading new books, which are also (sometimes) amazing.  But this is what I’ve been reading lately.

Magician’s Ward, Patricia C. Wrede

Much like Mairelon the Magician.  Too many names of people, but I don’t care because I am more interested in Kim’s learning magic and having a Season and Coming Out at a ball and having Offers of Marriage to turn down.  In pretty dresses.  Can there be more pretty dresses?  And God, pretty shoes?  I need new shoes so much.  My favorite shoes are all reaching the end of their lives – the pink ones that go with all my red-toned tops; the adorable tan strappy sandals that I wore all over the place and I love them and I don’t want them to go; and the little black ones I wore to prom (I KNOW I HAVE TO LET THEM GO) and then forgot about for several years and then rediscovered, with the sweet little kitten heel.  Sigh.

Sorcery and Cecelia, Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

I love Sorcery and Cecelia.  Know why?  Because the two authors wrote it using the letter game!  The letter game!  They really did!  Kate has gone to London to have her Season, and poor Cecelia is stuck at home in Essex.  They have all sorts of fun with a marquis and a magical chocolate pot, and a wicked witch called Miranda, and beautiful friends and relations.

Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede are obviously having fun here, and they manage a plot that hangs together really well over two locations and considering they were making it up as they went along.  Reading this again for the first time in a while, I am extra triple curious about what they changed when they decided to get it published.  I would think to play the letter game, you’d have to be quite attentive to minor details in the other person’s letter, and also be flexible enough to ditch elements of the plot you had planned if the other person said something that messed it up.  Tricky!  But it sounds so fun.  One of these days…

Crocodile on the Sandbank, Elizabeth Peters

Amelia Peabody makes me laugh.  I don’t necessarily read this series for the mysteries, though I recall finding some of them quite satisfying.  I really read them for the characters – Amelia is so determined and brilliant, and Evelyn is sweet without being sweety-sweet (usually, and when she is sweety-sweet it just makes me laugh, and she’s all There is an image enshrined in my heart – oh, Elizabeth Peters, why are you so funny all the time?); and the Emersons are charming.

Elizabeth Peters has a wicked sense of humor, and as many times as I’ve read her books, they always make me laugh.  Well-done her for giving her detective a family without making her boring – and carrying on adding family members and not forgetting them in subsequent books.  She does make oodles of good characters, though at a certain point there are too many all at once.

But I’ve strayed from the point.  Um, yes, Crocodile on the Sandbank.  Did I say, it’s set in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century?  There are pyramids all over the place, and the characters all have sumptuous fun complaining about the treatment of antiquities (it is really shocking, to be fair – it makes me want to cry even when the antiquities in question are fictional). Plus, whenever silly characters show up, everyone makes fun of them!  Hooray!

What are some books you return to repeatedly?  If you like them so much perhaps I will like them too…

Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn

My fourth book for the RIP Challenge, because apparently I just cannot get it together to read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher right now.  Silent in the Grave is the first of (so far) three mysteries with Lady Julia Grey, whose husband passes away at the start of this book.  After his death, private investigator Nicholas Brisbane tells her that he believes her husband was murdered.  She rejects this possibility out of hand; but a year later, after her mourning time is over, she finds clues in her house that make her wonder – was he murdered?  And if so, how and by whom?

I enjoyed this book a lot.  Obviously I am in the mood for slightly frothy set-in-England historicalish mysteries!  Silent in the Grave is – er, derivative seems harsh, but let’s just say you can see its literary antecedents.  Julia Grey owes a fair bit to Amelia Peabody (okay, yeah, have to read those again soon), and Brisbane is squarely in the tradition of dark tortured heroes.  Which is why I won’t necessarily need to own this book or the ones that follow, but I would like to get them out of the library.  Because, you know.  They’re fun.

On the other hand, I am not completely satisfied with this book’s treatment of gender issues.  Lady Julia is constantly doing silly things that cause trouble, without thinking about them, and Brisbane is all YOU ARE VERY STUPID.  Sometimes she does clever things, and this is noted, but there did seem to be a surfeit of silliness on her part, with lots of good sense and deductive skills on the side of Brisbane.  I do not like this.  I shall read Elizabeth Peters as an antidote.  And then I was not in love with the way male homosexuality was managed in the book.  I can’t put my finger on what bugged me about it, but I just didn’t care for it.  Queer Victorian history is rich and fascinating, and it seemed like Deanna Raybourn just didn’t want to be bothered with it, and made all her gay characters sort of two-dimensional.

This has not been a very positive review of a book that gave me a lot of pleasure – I just don’t want to give it a glowing review and then everyone have high expectations and then be like, Hm, this book isn’t all that great.  Because it isn’t all that great, unless you are in total guilty pleasure mode, and I am.  No judgment please. 

Other reviews: Bride of the Book God, A Garden Carried in the Pocket, At Home with Books, bookshelves of doom, S. Krishna’s Books, Medieval Bookworm, Reading Matters, ReadingAdventures, What Kate’s Reading, Framed and Booked, Mysteries in Paradise, Lesa’s Book Critiques, Angieville, Wendi’s Book Corner, My Random Acts of Reading, Miss Picky’s Column, The Thrillionth Page, Sadie-Jean’s Book Blog, & tell me if I missed yours so I can add a link!

It’s National Caps Lock Day today

And also, by a wild coincidence?  The birthday of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s erstwhile lover, creepy anti-Semitic xenophobe in his middle-ish years, and slightly more subdued jerk after that.

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS WAS NOT A VERY NICE PERSON.  He had an extremely difficult life BUT NOT EVERYBODY WHO HAS A BAD CHILDHOOD TURNS OUT TO BE AN ASS.  This one time, Lord Alfred Douglas decided he hated all the gays everywhere and was renouncing any such tendencies on his own part, and as part of his new resolution, he SUED EVERYONE and then embarked on a MEAN CAMPAIGN OF MEANNESS and hounded poor dear sweet faithful doglike Robbie Ross TO DEATH.

What is more, he was VERY VERY CRAZY.  In fact it is very fitting that his birthday is National Caps Lock Day, because he was a fairly capslocky sort of person.  (I AM IN LOVE with the word capslocky.  It is a gorgeous word and I am using it forever to talk about screamy people.  GLORIOUS.)

Lord Alfred Douglas convinced Oscar Wilde to sue his father for libel, which was an unfortunate decision for poor Oscar Wilde but he did it to himself.  Then Bosie wanted to go into the witness stand and testify to the fact that his father was a terrible person, but everyone said, Bosie, honey, that’s completely irrelevant to this case.

And Bosie said, Yes, yes, I see your point, but what you are failing to consider is that I HATE HIM I HATE HIM I HATE HIM.

He was inexplicably convinced that he was fantastic in court, so in his later life he sued everyone (EVERYONE Y’ALL) just constantly, and sometimes got sued himself (he went to jail for libel when he said that Winston Churchill was part of a Jewish conspiracy to assassinate Lord Kitchener or someone), and every time he was a witness in court, it went down like this:

Bosie: *testifies*
Lawyers: That is all very well and good, but we heard a rumor that you did dirty things with Oscar Wilde when you were younger.
Bosie: Shut up.
Lawyers: Did you, by any chance, do dirty things with Oscar Wilde when you were younger?
Bosie: You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Lawyers: Hahahahaha, look at these hilarious letters he sent you.  My own boy, rose-red lips, madness of kissy kiss kissing love and kisses from Oscar Wilde.  In light of these letters, did you—
Bosie: SHUT UP GOD WHY DOES EVERYONE BRING UP THOSE STUPID LETTERS I COULD NOT STOP HIM FROM SENDING SICKENING LETTERS TO ME—
Judge: Let counsel talk.
Bosie: EVERY TIME I COME HERE THIS BESTIAL DRIVEL IS BROUGHT OUT—
Judge: Chill out dude.
Bosie: —YOU LOST MY LAST CASE ON PURPOSE AND EVERYONE HATES ME AND THEY THINK ROBBIE ROSS IS SO GREAT BUT I HAVE MET HIM AND HE IS NOT THAT GOOD AND IF ANYONE DID DIRTY THINGS WITH OSCAR WILDE IT WAS ROBBIE ROSS GOD I HATE HIM IF IT WERE NOT FOR HIM MY LIFE WOULD BE OKAY GODDAMMIT I JUST HATE EVERYONE—

Oh, yeah, and he also thought he was a better poet than Shelley.  Have you ever read a poem by him for a class?  Because I haven’t!  BUT I HAVE READ A LOT OF POEMS BY SHELLEY.

HAPPY DAMN BIRTHDAY.

(This post has given me a headache.  I do not like National Caps Lock Day.  But I am keeping the word capslocky.)

Mairelon the Magician, Patricia C. Wrede

Y’all, I’m applying for graduate school.  It is stressful as hell.  I’m telling you because the more people I tell, the more shaming it would be for me not to go through with it.  And yes!  I am using shame as a motivator!  If it can beat the crap out of me every time I do something wrong, then by God I can make it work for me to do something constructive AND AWESOME.  Since launching on this project of telling everyone, I have outlined my personal statement, asked for two recommendations, started an online application, and found the hard copy of my GRE scores.   So there.

I mention this because all the anxiety of this has made it necessary for me to read very unstressful books.  I had to take a break from The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher – although I am enjoying it! – because dude, a murder investigation has lots of facets.  Lots of elements that all have to be tied down and managed before you can proceed.  I am abandoning it not because it is sad that a three-year-old boy got murdered brutally (though that is sad) but because it reminds me too much of applying to grad school.

I read Mairelon the Magician instead.  When I was a little girl, oh how I loved Patricia C. Wrede.  I admired her desperately, and I even wrote her a letter to tell her so.  AND SHE WROTE BACK.  She wrote this lovely long letter where she told me how to be a proper writer (I still have a copy of it somewhere), and I believe that my ability to be objective about her books was shot to hell at that instant.

In my opinion – though maybe I just like Regency novels – Wrede is at her best with these alternate-England books set in Regency times, where magicians are part of the fabric of European society. Sorcery and Cecelia is my favorite of all her books, and I love Mairelon the Magician and its sequel, Magician’s Ward, nearly as much.

Guttersnipe Kim is caught snooping around in the caravan of a magician called Mairelon, and he takes her on as an assistant.  As is wont to happen in books though not (I suspect) in real life.  He is under suspicion for stealing a set of powerfully magical items; he has managed to recover one of them and is trying to track down the other five.  And so, of course, is everyone else in the world.  Hijinks ensue.

If you absolutely forced me to say something bad about Mairelon, I guess a case could be made for there being too many characters.  They are always dashing out and in while you try frantically to remember who they are and what is motivating them to chase after Mairelon or the Saltash platter or each other.  But more in a, you know, a bawdy French farce way, than in a literary flaw way.  Mairelon the Magician is just fun, and friendly – there’s chicanery, and conjuring tricks, and dodgy Regency thugs.  Hooray.

If you have written a (possibly less biased) review, let me know and I will link to it!

The Seance, John Harwood

I read this book mostly in bed over several nights, while the weather outside was obligingly turning into fall.  Although there are things about the cold weather that are miserable (mainly miserable for my hands and feet, which get very poor circulation as my blood is too busy keeping the rest of me warm like a furnace), they are all outweighed by the snuggly loveliness of cuddling down into your bed when it’s cold outside.

(It’s not cold outside yet, by the way – just coolish and lovely – but I am anticipating the necessity of getting out my cache of spare blankets and piling them on top of me at night.  I enjoy doing this, you know, the two nights a year it’s really cold in Louisiana.)

The Séance is a perfect book for the fall, and for the RIP Challenge.  Constance Langton inherits a state home from a distant relation, but the lawyer in charge of giving her the inheritance advises her to sell it straightaway and never go inside it.  As support for this bold claim (which would get me on the next train to see the place), he sends her a packet of papers relating to the house.  They tell the strange history of the house – riddled with tragedy and disappearances, the latest of which is the mysterious disappearance of an entire family from Wraxford Hall.

John Harwood succeeds brilliantly at creating the atmosphere of the spooky Gothic manor house.  The two characters, John Montague and Eleanor Unwin, who tell the history of Wraxford Hall, are initially outsiders to the Hall, looking in on it and wondering about its secrets.  As the story goes in, they (and we) are drawn more deeply into it and its frightening secrets.  It gets claustrophobic eventually, knowing all that you know about its past – you jump when the characters hear a noise.

The frame story, which follows Constance Langton as she tries to work out the secrets of the manor house, works less well.  It’s by far the least interesting thing about the book, but it takes up an unfortunate number of pages. I found Constance dull, and her backstory doesn’t play into the rest of the book, and all the time she was onscreen as it were with her half-hearted underdeveloped love interest subplot, I was going, Where’s Eleanor Unwin?  Why can’t she come back?  Less time with Constance would have meant more time with Eleanor Unwin and John Montague.  That would have been better.

I remember reading The Ghost Writer in England and thinking, Yes, okay, that was good, but think how much better it could have been.  And my response to The Séance is much the same.  They both had me on the edge of my seat while I was reading, but when they were done, the plots did not satisfy me.

Do you have this problem with very atmospheric books?  Too much build-up, and not enough pay-off, so you feel let-down when it’s all over?

On a slightly different note, when you read a ghost story, do you insist upon its being an actual ghost (ghost/poltergeist/other occult event), in the end?  Or do you prefer there to have been a human being orchestrating everything?

This week on BTT

We’re moving in a couple weeks (the first time since I was 9 years old), and I’ve been going through my library of 3000+ books, choosing the books that I could bear to part with and NOT have to pack to move. Which made me wonder…

When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain?

Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This would have described me for most of my life, by the way.)

And–when you DO weed out books from your collection (assuming that you do) …what do you do with them? Throw them away (gasp)? Donate them to a charity or used bookstore?  SELL them to a used bookstore? Trade them on Paperback Book Swap or some other exchange program?

I absolutely LOVE getting rid of books.  LOVE IT.  YES I DO.  It is so cleansing and nice, and when I have done it, I feel lighter all over and full of rejoicing.

I bet you thought that I was going to say just kidding in this paragraph but I’m not.  I truly truly love getting rid of books.  If I get rid of a book, that means I have space on my shelf for another, more desirable book.  Plus, if I can get rid of books I don’t really want or will never reread, that means that I am not a hoarder.  I am instead a book connoisseur with only the very best books in my library.

In the best case scenario, I list them on PaperbackSwap, causing rejoicing to the PBS member that gets a book for free, and rejoicing for me when I get a credit to get another book.  But I also like to donate them charitably to charity.  Depends what time of year it is.  If the book’s in truly terrible shape I do throw it away.  One of these days I’m going to buy a proper copy of Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown and get rid of the falling-apart one that I have, but it’s going to be a sad day.