Book Cull

Which books would you get rid of if you had no bookshelf space left and the books you had were piled two-deep?   Last week I embarked upon a cull.  I’d never done such a thing before.  Each book, I’d always reckoned, was part of my history so how could I possibly ever let it go?  But did I really need two books on the mysterious disappearance of bees?  Was losing Ian McKewan’s ‘Chesil Beach’-  which I hadn’t much cared for first time round - going to spoil my life?   Did I really need three Matilda’s by Roald Dahl, or one no doubt gripping but still over-length ‘Labyrinth’ by Kate Mosse? 

Amongst the books that remained were some real treasures, including a diamond jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria’s life which I never even knew I owned, a first edition of ‘Owen Glyndwr’ by Arthur Grandville Bradley and a host of wonderful ‘How to Write’ books, including those by William Faulkner, Annie Dillard, Flannery O Connor, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. 

I’m a funny sort of reader.  I read a lot, but there’s a lot I don’t like. Often the books that everybody’s reading leave me cold, yet when I do like a book, I go crazy for it.

So which books are left? Who’s stayed on my shelves?  All the books listed as favourites on my Facebook page are obviously staying, and so are as odd and wonderful a mixture as Popol Vuh [the Mayan Book of the Dead] and the Kalavala [Finland’s national myth in verse], Katherine Paterson’s children’s books - all of them including my favourite ‘The Great Gilly Hopkins’ - William Trevor’s ‘Two Lives’,  ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ [just because I've read it doesn't meant I can do Maths], ‘The Testament of Gideon Mack’ by James Robertson, ‘Cloudstreet’ by Tim Winton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Cost of Discipleship’, George Borrow’s ‘Wild Wales’, The Complete Works of Thomas Traherne, and the same of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert McFarlane’s ‘Wild Places’, Roger Deakin’s ‘Waterlog’,  Bill Bryson’s ‘Mother Tongue’, Mal Peet’s ‘The Penalty’,  David Almond’s ‘Clay,’ Philip Pullman’s ‘Northern Lights,’ Tolkien, C.S. Lewis [sorry Philip for mentioning you and him in the same breath] – the  list goes on and on…………  

And which books have gone?  The answer’s very simple – none.  For three days, I pulled out books and stacked them up ready for the Oxfam shop.  They’re piled up on the stairs.  The books I never read, and know I won’t; the ones I have read but won’t again; the ones that add nothing to the total sum of what I know, or enrich my shelves or enrich my life.  Here they all are.  And can I bring myself to let them go? 

So far, no luck.