Decluttering Your Bookshelf
Remember the start of the pandemic? When we didn’t know much about the new virus and were staying home? Like many people during that time, I took the opportunity of mostly being indoors and quarantined to clear out some of my possessions. And only a few months into lockdown, I was offered a new job and needed to move halfway across the country.
It was pure luck that I’d already been starting to go through my things and declutter. And if I remember correctly, I ended up taking five boxes of books to a local secondhand bookshop that, bless them, did not have the space to take more donations but gladly accepted mine and they were added to the mountain of donations in the front of their store. (If you’re ever in Provo, Utah, please give Pioneer Books some love.) I’ve moved a lot in my adult life, and every time I move I end up downsizing my book collection to some degree.
I’m a librarian and a former bookseller, and I weed my book collection every few years. Weeding is the library term for it, and I think it’s a better framework to use — you’re curating your literary garden so you can better enjoy it and so it thrives. None of the books I weeded and have weeded are necessarily “bad” books, but to follow the KonMari principle that they had fulfilled their purpose and no longer sparked joy for me.
