Konmari-ing my bookshelves – Part 1

Hello! I’ve decided to go through all my books and purge some to make room for the clearance sale books I got back in July. Today I’m going to show you the ‘before’ and the initial sorting. Later, I’ll make another post with the final remaining books and the reorganized shelves – it’ll include the new hauled books, but I won’t particularly point out which they are so a seasonal bookhaul can still happen.

Konmari, if you’re unaware, is a cleaning ideology from the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, and while I don’t actually own the book, the concept boils down to ‘Hold a thing in your hand. If it brings you joy, keep it. If it doesn’t, don’t keep it’. I’ve seen enough posts and videos about people doing this to their books that I figured I had the concept, and I tweaked it a bit to include ‘I didn’t like this book’ or ‘This sounds good to me still’, yada yada yada.

Anyways, this is where I made a mess. As we speak, they’re still in piles on the floor upstairs. That’ll be this week’s project. I need to update all my goodreads shelves to match, too.

Pulling everything off the shelves

To do this correctly I had to actually empty my shelves. Just looking at a book on the shelf and deciding to keep or toss it doesn’t count. I needed to actually hold it and decide ‘do I want this back on my shelves’. So, these are all of my and my husband’s books. I keep them together in the book room, intermixed for genre-sorting’s sake. I’ll separate them out below. The blurred ones are the haul books, which I dun wanna spoil yet.

Initial Sorting

The first thing I did was sort out my husband’s books from my own. Why? I did it to prove a point (and to avoid me accidentally purging any of his books. I was only doing my own). My goofball of a husband Chris was under the impression that he only owned a few books here and there, and wasn’t really contributing to all the space needed to store my books. This is where I proved that he was taking up at least a book case’s worth of books on his own. While I still have way more, he is adding an additional case’s worth. So pbtbt pbtbt pbtbt.

The below picture are of his books:

Next I sorted mine into ‘keep’, ‘maybe toss’ and ‘toss’. That’s where they are now. In the next post, I’ll actually go through the ‘maybe toss’ books and make a final decision. The blurred books in the ‘keep’ are Chris’s books, so my ‘keep’ books don’t look larger than they are. 😛

Keep

Maybe toss

Toss

We have another, nicer copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide, so dun yell at me for that. Anyways, you’ll notice a lot of textbooks along the bottom of the toss pile. I went to school for two different degrees, each having concentrations on top of that. So, I have a lot of books on a variety of topics. So I kept the most interesting or useful ones and tossed the elective class books, etc. They will be going to my local community college, where they will be donated to developing countries where older textbooks can still be used in classes.

The rest will be opened up to any friend who wants to take them, and then the remainder will be donated to a local church-run charity shop up where my parents live. Since I’m still on a book buying ban, I don’t wanna trade them in at Half Price Books, because they’ll give me store credit and then I’ll have to test my self control, which I don’t know if I could handle. So I’m just avoiding it all together.

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So! The next konmari-related post will be the finished product. Wish me luck! Right now, brain says ‘toss all the maybe-toss books’, but we’ll see how it acts when I actually go to do it. Happy reading!

Bonus pics

My cat enjoyed the reorganization almost as much as I did.