Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Why am I so screwed in the head?

While this heading could apply to MANY areas of my life, I have a particular topic on that tonight. Books. Sweet, comforting, friendly books. As part of my "change the house around without going crazy redecorating and spend money I don't have" initiative, I'm working on decluttering myself. Here's hoping that this will (somehow) also lead to a less cluttered mind. My biggest clutter area is books. My townhouse is approximately 1500 square feet. I own approximately two billion books. That math does not work out harmoniously. I get that. I know that paperback books aren't lovely additions to any decor. Here's my sticking point...I completely HEART my books. Until I started to really weed through them, I didn't realize the extent of my attachment.

Book background...I love to read. I never disliked reading, but somehow when I hit Judy Blume age, my brain completely latched on. I escalated quickly to Danielle Steel novels (not sure why this was considered appropriate reading material for a 9 year old, but young adult fiction didn't really exist in 1980 and once you were out of picture books you kinda graduated to whatever your mom had around). I realized sometime in college, when I was re-reading some of that delightful trash, that there was no way I understood the somewhat veiled "adult" content of the love scenes (of course by that age I found them laughably mild). My entire adult life, I've read everything I can get my hands on, 3 to 4 books a week, with a heavy emphasis on fiction (I have reality for my non-fiction, so I don't always feel compelled to invite it any further into frannieland). I have been in more book clubs than I care to count (they don't seem to be for me...in my experience they have generally been exercises in pretension. Come on people - read the good stuff, but don't act like you're too good to pick up a James Patterson novel).

Now I have books spread all over the floor of my bedroom, the bed in the guest room, and I really want to safely bundle them all back up onto their respective messy shelves and let them be. However...I have to keep reminding myself that change is good (right? RIGHT??)

3 comments:

  1. Frannie - i LOVE this!! I don't know why but i didn't get the orginal email that you sent out to us but Dani forwarded to me. This is just GREAT!! And yes, change is good - books are good too but you know i'm not one to talk! Do you think your organizer lady travels?! Ronnie would LOVE it if i did something like that! He can't stand all our junk. Anyway - just wanted to say hi and i'm so happy you're doing this! (Blogging - not getting rid of your books. But that's probably good too...) Love you!

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  2. I brought 200-ish books to the office for my coworkers to go through. This afternoon is the cut off and then I'm taking them to good will. I've gotten extreme haircuts more easily than this book thing. My house looks SO weird! And I have lots of shelves I need to dust.

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  3. I remember Judy Blume, but I don't recall reading Danielle Steel as a nine year old. LOL!

    200-ish books donated? WOW! Kudos to you. I know this wasn't easy, but change IS good. :)

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