At right, you can see a picture of my bookshelf on a good day. What may stand out to you immediately is exactly how few of the things on the shelves are, in fact, books.
In fact, on the top two shelves, a pair of brave books did manage to infiltrate clutter’s territory, only to be slain in the heat of battle. You can see the results of their incursion - two lonely books under a pile of smugly triumphant junk.
If anything is going to break up my marriage and destroy my happy home, it’ll be this bookshelf.
I myself have precious few books on there; mostly reference and things I’m going to read Real Soon Now. I believe that most books need to be read once and then gotten rid of. How many times can one person read The Guy Not Taken? Is this such a classic that it gets pulled down every autumn to be enjoyed in the fading light of a cool afternoon?
I submit no. The aforementioned book is nothing less than damning evidence of a packrat mentality. Let your eyes wander downwards in horror to the shelf of photo albums; photo albums, I say! We live in the 21st century - we have such modern convienences as a digital picture frames, a “My Pictures” folder, and large trashcans, yet my poor Wal-Mart Deluxe $20 bookshelf is tasked with holding these memories that are so trifling they don’t even merit a 10-second slice of LCD time.
But do not point your blaming finger at me, good sirs and madams, for I am not the one offloading my recollections to unstable furniter. Verily, it is my bride, my apple, my raison d’etre who is holding on to what amounts to little more than bundling kindling. She believes that books hold sentimental value - laugh not - and that it is worthy to possess an overflowing frame of pressed particle board. She tells me that she cannot dispose of The Lord of the Flies because I gave it to her as a gift, and that she simply cannot part with The Awakening because it was the copy she read when she fell in love with feminist literature, and we simply must keep Jennifer Weiner’s oeuvre because, well, what if Jennifer Weiner came to visit?
I yearn for long-ago days when households possessed but two books - the Bible and a dictionary, and they couldn’t read either.
What am I to do? I suppose the first step is to ban from my bookshelf anything that is not actually a book. That includes coffee mugs, iPods, and a certain object that is either a bathroom tile or a forgotten slice of toast.
Stage two would be a nice, understanding sitdown in which we discuss the miracles of modern photograph storage and cardboard boxes.
Finally, and only as a last result, would I point the center of my existence (the aforementioned wife, if you’ve lost track) to this post about uncluttering bookshelves. And while she’s distracted with that, I’m going to take a large black garbage bag and fill it with everything I don’t need.
Remember, dear readers, that in marriage it is important to let the little things slide. And the loss of a 10-year-old copy of Dracula is certainly a minute matter, wouldn’t you agree?
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