✨Read the first post! Decluttering Books 1: Getting started✨

At some point I said “getting rid of books” and it made me sick.

I was already anxious about letting go of my books so just saying, just thinking, that I would “get rid of” them sounded extreme.

I was worried that trying to clear some shelf space was in the same realm as book bans or book burnings.

So, I was worried. I was anxious. Somehow, though, I found the right inspiration, motivation, and guidance for me to finally start decluttering my books, bookshelves, and brain.

A retrospective

On March 1, 2018, I began documenting my attempt to deal with all my books. There were a variety of issues I wanted to deal with like

• not enough storage space
• what the books I display say about me
• what I want the books I display say about me, wondering if I want my books to say something about me
• wondering why I even display them
• feeling weird that most of my books were from college
• realizing I hadn’t read much of anything new in book form (other than cookbooks)
• wondering if I should keep my cookbooks
• where I should keep my cookbooks
• and that I wasn’t the only ones with books in the house.

I documented this progress (and there was progress!) on Instagram. My first post in my feed was that first day of March and my last post was on October 14, 2018 (or as Instagram said, 253 weeks ago as of this writing). I’m pretty happy that I kept up with it for that long! One thing I’m interested in gleaning from reviewing the posts is why it took that long.

My account name was “bookbyshelf” (which I still find to be an awkward spin on the name I wanted but couldn’t get, “shelfbyshelf”). The account is private, though I think it may have been public for a bit. I was probably hoping people I knew would want to follow along. Some did and there were some people I didn’t know that followed the account. I don’t feel like I wanted all that many people to follow, though I imagine there was some part of me that wanted this process to be a spectacle or at least a display. Just like when I display m books on a shelf.

My book life has changed a lot in the past two years so I’ve been thinking about the books I read and keep a lot again. I’ve decided to look back on my 2018 review of the books I keep and post that review somewhere that I believe can host it better. That somewhere is here, my website and in blog form.

How this will be organized

So, basically, I’ll transfer the images and captions from the bookbyshelf Instagram account to this site. In addition to re-posting those items over here, I’ll make some edits and add some new thoughts. Those edits and editions may not happen on every post but you’ll see a note if there are any changes from the original post.

There will be some changes to the content of the posts that, hopefully, will make them more accessible. Two of those I know I’ll be adding are alt text to images and clickable links (there were URLs in the captions and they have not been clickable).

There are 41 post on the Instagram account and I’m currently planning on adding other posts in this series (like this post). That’s almost a year of weekly posts! I’m pretty excited about that.

The structure of each post from the Instagram account will more or less be:

• Image from the Instagram post
• Caption from the Instagram post
• Review and reflection; how this post relates to me now
• Tagging and categories for each post in the blog

There will also be posts in the series that aren’t a repost from the Instagram account.

This will be a series about decluttering books but there are some other topics I’ll at least mention. These are topics related to my life, specifically, and how books show up in my life. These topics include: foreign language learning, cooking and baking, where you live, having a young child, libraries, sentimental value, trends, the beach, and what to declutter next.

Thanks for reading!

I’m excited for this project and excited to have a new place to share this experience. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as a “bookworm” but it’s an experience I feel like I’ve had in my life. Books, what they are, and what they mean, have been important to me but I started to feel like a bit of a fraud about it all. This decluttering project gave me the time and space to be comfortable with my relationship to books and move forward.

These days, I’ve been reading a lot. I mostly read comics and listen to audiobooks now and have an often overwhelming TBR list. I expect that this retrospective will add a layer or two or ten to the thinking I’ve been doing about books lately.