Jennifer Perrine's Blog - Posts Tagged "library"
Leave Your Things Behind 'Cause It's All Going Off Without You
In preparation for moving this summer, I've been paring and pruning my collection of books, trying to cull all those tomes I'll never read again (or never read in the first place). I had to psych myself up for this process for weeks. My house--heck, my life--is pretty spartan, but books are the one thing in which I tend to overindulge, and I have a hard time parting with any book, no matter how unlikely I am to pick it up again.
Somehow, though, I managed to let go of about a third of my books, which I donated to the local public library. I didn't have the heart--and the library staff didn't have the energy--to keep track of the count as cart after cart was filled, but we guesstimated there were around five or six hundred books in total.
Among the gems now available to residents of Des Moines:
Reader's Digest: Creative Cooking I have been carrying this book around with me since childhood, when I could sit for hours with it, fascinated by the color illustrations of all the different fish and cuts of meat. (Yes, I was a weird kid.) I have never once cooked anything from this cookbook.
Not one, but two copies of Dune Messiah. Why do I have two? No idea, though I was a huge fan of Dune--both the book and the David Lynch film--when I was a kid. (Fear is the mind-killer, y'all!)
How to Be a TV Quiz Show Millionaire Bought for me by a friend when they found out I was going to appear on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Did it help? Maybe. But no, I'm not a millionaire, from quiz show proceeds or otherwise.
Selections from my once complete Stephen King collection. Until the mid-90s, I religiously bought every book he wrote. I had an entire bookshelf in my house devoted to those books, but it's time to free up some space and let the local library's lending list grow just a little shorter for Gerald's Game and Christine.
A battered copy of Beowulf from high school. It's yellowed, the pages are falling out, and--twenty years after I acquired this version--I now have better translations. So, this one goes to the bindery and, I hope, someone who will share my fondness for that alliterative epic.
And in case you'd like to scrutinize my entire Smauglike hoard, photos:
Somehow, though, I managed to let go of about a third of my books, which I donated to the local public library. I didn't have the heart--and the library staff didn't have the energy--to keep track of the count as cart after cart was filled, but we guesstimated there were around five or six hundred books in total.
Among the gems now available to residents of Des Moines:
Reader's Digest: Creative Cooking I have been carrying this book around with me since childhood, when I could sit for hours with it, fascinated by the color illustrations of all the different fish and cuts of meat. (Yes, I was a weird kid.) I have never once cooked anything from this cookbook.
Not one, but two copies of Dune Messiah. Why do I have two? No idea, though I was a huge fan of Dune--both the book and the David Lynch film--when I was a kid. (Fear is the mind-killer, y'all!)
How to Be a TV Quiz Show Millionaire Bought for me by a friend when they found out I was going to appear on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Did it help? Maybe. But no, I'm not a millionaire, from quiz show proceeds or otherwise.
Selections from my once complete Stephen King collection. Until the mid-90s, I religiously bought every book he wrote. I had an entire bookshelf in my house devoted to those books, but it's time to free up some space and let the local library's lending list grow just a little shorter for Gerald's Game and Christine.
A battered copy of Beowulf from high school. It's yellowed, the pages are falling out, and--twenty years after I acquired this version--I now have better translations. So, this one goes to the bindery and, I hope, someone who will share my fondness for that alliterative epic.
And in case you'd like to scrutinize my entire Smauglike hoard, photos:
