Declutter?? Why I’m Keeping ALL THE BOOKS

Decluttering. Just the word gives many of us a little sigh of relief. Believe me, I get irrationally emotional over a good declutter as much as the next self-respecting Gen X-er, but there’s one stalwart of the minimalist movement that I’m reluctant to embrace – bidding adieu to the books.

As a literature lover, I am, naturally, partial to my physical copies of favorite novels and playscripts, but the reason I want a grand home library is not so much for me, but for my children.

Yes, I understand that my 3 year old doesn’t want to read my paperback of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but hear me out before you go all KonMari on your library.

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Growing up, my family had a wall of books. Adult books – all the books my parents had accumulated in their reading lives. Novels, histories, textbooks… It’s not as if I dove right in as soon as I graduated from “Dick and Jane,” but that wall of books always stood as a symbol to me – a towering representation that my parents cared enough about words, stories, and information to have accumulated all of these volumes.

I learned things about my parents by looking at those shelves. My Dad studied something called “Engineering in Aeronautics”? Can you imagine? Did my Mom really read a novel with 900 pages? Color me impressed.

I also learned about the world by tucking in and losing a few hours perusing, which a kids can only do if books are at her fingertips. A lot of things I didn’t understand, but that made me aspire to grow my skills as a reader. The diamond of our family library was a giant, leather-bound Oxford dictionary with the letters indented into the sides. It had these butterfly thin pages, so you had to be quite careful with it, and it was so large that my Dad built a stand for it. In the middle were maybe 20 color pages with flowers, insects, and best of all – flags of the world. Who even knew all these countries existed?? Everything about that dictionary was so appealing.

Second to the dictionary was the set of encyclopedias my parents bought letter by letter from the grocery store. Let me tell you, there is no Wikipedia rabbit hole that rivals sitting down with the “C” to look up “cheetah” for a school report, and getting sucked into the entry about “Chinese headdress,” and then somehow learning all there is to know about “cuttlefish.” That kind of discovery beats getting lost in cat videos, any day.

Also, just seeing those books every day made them part of my life and my cultural lexicon. The Complete Works of Shakespeare was something that resided in my home, so when I started reading Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade English, it felt like a text that I could take ownership of. I never did read The Art of War, The Clan of the Cave Bear, or James Michner’s Hawaii, but if referenced, I wasn’t at a loss.

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These days, I read a lot on my e-reader. It’s convenient and the books tend to cost a lot less. But, as I have young pre-reader growing in my home, I have some regrets that she doesn’t see me with a book always in hand, as I did with my mother. It probably looks no different to the times when I’m scrolling through Facebook, so how will my daughter ever know how much I read or what I’m reading? I don’t miss so much the smell of the paper or the feel of the pages, like many do, but my hesitation about the e-reader is that it may diminish the perceived importance of books in our home.

So, I’ll gladly give Vinnies all the clothes I haven’t worn this season, digitize my bank records, and toss away all the unflattering lipsticks crammed in my drawer. But, I’m keeping most of the books. I have someone here who needs to see them.

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