Books I Can Live Without

From yesterday in the New York Times:

Room For Debate: Books You Can Live Without

A series of short essays by various published authors talking about books which they have or will get rid of, and books they’ll forever keep in their bookshelves until the end of the days. 

During the clean up in September, under the huge pressure of not having enough space for all my crap and the utter need to get myself organized, I found myself having to choose between books and extra space – and having extra space won.

So, off they went those books written by little known one-hit-writers that ended up in my possession when a friend of mine, getting rid of her own clutter, shoveled them into my arms when I didn’t manage to turn on my heels fast enough to run.

I also said bye-bye to old text books from college – throwing away those heavy-as-bricks accounting books made my heart give a little leap, and I couldn’t help but raising my arms in glory after getting rid of a box filled with books with titles that included words as management, economics, and statistics – buaghhh.

Finally, I sent away those incredibly crappy books I gathered in two years of belonging to an absurd book club (to which I still belong to – don’t ask) that made me feel as if my brain cells had been reduced to 2 and all the money spent in my education was thrown down the drain.

Nowadays with the clean up finally over and the books neatly placed in shelves that will soon turn into dust magnets, I've finally managed to put in place those books that I haven't yet read but will soon: Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” and “Sputnik Sweetheart” by the same author; Kate Mosse's "Labyrinth";  Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”; Chuck Palahniuk’s “Snuff”; David Sedaris’ “When you are engulfed in Flames” and one I am itching to read, “Holiday’s on Ice”, among a half a dozen others.

I've placed in our spare room the books that I chose to keep and will never get rid of because they not only define me, they’ve also made me. Organized in alphabetic order, theme, language, and country of origin are my favorite books written by Gaiman, Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Kundera,  Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, Palahniuk, Garcia Marquez, Sedaris, King, Rowling, Allende, in addition to half a dozen  anthologies of classic literature.

All these books will remain in a bookshelf along with others written by ‘not-so-special' writers, but soon enough, when in need of another cleanup, some of them will have to go away – however, until then, I think I’ll keep for a little longer those books by Helen Fielding (“Bridget Jones’ Diary”), Audrey Niffenegger (“The Time Traveler’s Wife”), and the first two of the Twilight series (“Twilight” and “New Moon” which I really hate, but, you see, I cannot bring myself to throw away books about vampires) … ah, those guilty little pleasures.