Surveying the stacks & making some lists

I have a holiday gift list up at Alaska Dispatch for the pilot or aircraft owner in your life. Lots of great ideas on this one - I've been collecting items for months to add to it.

I also have a new column up at Bookslut with some great adventure novels for teens (my 100th column!) and I have a feature on NF titles for kids/teens that are really off the beaten path (sea monsters! collective nouns! hovercrafts!)

That feature also includes the coolest pop-up I've seen in ages on national parks. It's STUNNING.

I have enjoyed my friend Kelly Fineman's downsizing posts for the past few months and because I know her, they've made me think a lot more about getting rid of stuff than the average episode of Clean House. Also, Kelly's level of stuff sounds pretty similar to my own so she's a lot easier for me to identify with.

The other night I was downstairs sorting out books for future columns when I started looking at my own bookshelves. I'm pretty picky about the books I keep and I really have remarkably few when you consider how many I could keep (an insane number, trust me). But I do have two overloaded shelves of books I have bought or have been given to me that I plan to read someday and just haven't gotten to. They are a mess and some of the books have been there for years. I finally decided it was time to let them go.

Kelly's been writing a lot about space and keeping things for emotional reasons and not sitting on things because it's too hard to deal with the trouble of getting rid of them and all of this and more made me pull all the books off the 2 shelves and ruthlessly (RUTHLESSLY) go through them. I think I have about a dozen left which I am now going to read over the next couple of months. I might very well love them all and keep them forever, or give them a shot and pass them along but either way - those shelves are never going to be such a mess again. (Donating all discards this week to local Friends of Library bookstore.)

Books should never become a burden, emotional or otherwise. If you are not going to read them then it's time to set them free, so someone else can give them a good home. I can't believe it took me so long to get this message into my head. Thanks, Kelly!