The Great Sell Off

After four months sans blogging (well not quite four I did blog most of our vacation in August) what has prompted my return to the blogosphere? Well, I spent most of naptime this week, not napping myself or grading papers, but listing my academic books on half.com. I've been ruthlessly paring down my stash, keeping only the books most directly related to my dissertation.

De-booking on any level is a meaningful process, but this particular de-booking even more so. Do I need any of the books I'm getting rid of. Nope. Many of them I bought when the move away from the research library loomed large; I bought them simply because they seemed important to my project, and I could get them cheap, just in case. And some of them I'm pretty sure I bought just because it made me feel like I was working on my dissertation.

I had been keeping so many of the books I'm letting go in order to prepare for the classes I might teach. But those books are now 10 years old and woefully out of date to be relevant. And really, you don't need grad-level books to teach anything other than grad-level classes, something I can't imagine I'll be doing anytime soon.

I'm letting go the shelves of theory books; books I kept because they were books I loved to work on. I have another life you know, a life where I'm currently post-doc(ing) in Cambridge, strolling the backs while I revise my latest paper. In that life I need my theory brain, but in this life Kristeva, Baudrillard, and Lyotard can go by the by. I've got their soundbytes locked away and it's not like I'm living in a Farhenheit 451 world where I couldn't ever get the texts again.

Sigh, I'm de-booking. There's lots of good reasons to. I'm tired of clutter, I could use the freed up the space, and I imagine a move will be afoot sooner rather than later(and even with generous weight limits, books are heavy) but...

I still can't help but sigh that I'm de-booking and fret a bit over what it "means."