Bibliomania Redux

My wife has been doing a bit of summer cleaning. This time this meant getting rid of several boxes of her books. If we are to contemplate retirement, we need to think about where to put the books we bring home from work. She's not content to give away her books, of course. If she has to suffer, so must I, and so I was ordered to undergo the same ordeal.

I have a lot of books that I started but never finished. This could be due to getting bored, or just hating the book, but usually it's because something else - some other book - distracted me. I do plan to finish them someday, so getting rid of them now just doesn't seem reasonable.

Of course there are a lot of books that I have read. I would get rid of them except that I might want to read them again sometime.

The largest class of books consists of those I haven't read, or have barely started. Mostly these are technical books on subjects that interest me, especially math, physics, astronomy, biology, and economics. It would really be silly to have paid good money for them and give them away before reading them. Never mind the fact that I read such books more and more slowly as I get older, blinder and dumber. And that I already have more of these than I'm likely to read in any plausible lifetime.

Thinning a book collection is hard - maybe there is a good book on it somewhere.

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