Anyone else have a redneck family that started dropping off endless truckloads of random used books from various flea markets at your home the very moment they found out that you like to read?
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Thats so cruel. When I mention I like to read my family drops off endless amounts of books at my doorstep.
No but that sounds fucked up. A book collection should be a carefully curated catalog full of things that you personally love or find great use for, not some sad eclectic mix that looks like a hoarder's pile.
Unless you have a giant library to fill
My parents sort of did this to me for a while.. I did get some books I ended up really liking this way but we also lived way out in the country so getting to a library was difficult. Didn’t have much choice but to try them.
But then they realized I was well beyond kids/young adult books and started giving me books they liked when I was in 5th grade, like sphere and the third pandemic.. my teachers thought it was super weird, and I got a lot of negative comments about age appropriate-ness, but I had a dictionary and undiagnosed autism (diagnosed adhd, though), it was fine.
I was so excited when we moved and I was walking distance from a library. I ended up getting 2 library cards so I could reserve a bunch of stuff and still check out 5 at a time (I was there usually twice a week, and would just burn through books at around 1,000 pages a day, because it was all I ever did)
It's not that I'm not appreciative, it's just that a 40+ year old man like myself can handle only so many Julia Quinn, Emma Chase, and Tessa Dare books
If your whole schtick is about decluttering, you should be able to differentiate between "less" and "fewer." Getting things down to a countable number achieves "fewer"-ness.
Also, looking at walls of books sparks joy.
Sorry, less word more good
Less word more fewer!
Less book more feuer!
Careful there, you sound a bit like a nazi.
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+1
Less junk, fewer things. Less anxiety, fewer panic attacks.
... And I already reached semantic satiation with "fewer."
Less shit, fewer sewers.
But... Stephen King alone has written 65 novels...
That he remembers writing between all the coke he did
I’ve seen interviews with him where he mentioned: ‘I was reading a synopsis of a story that sounded really interesting’ only to discover that it was about a book that he had written. And apparently he has no memory of writing Cujo.
There’s ‘doing coke’ and ‘doing coke so much I forgot I wrote a fucking best selling novel’.
I read one of his short stories recently that followed one of the characters whose child died in Cujo. I love the idea of Stephen King completely forgetting he wrote that book and having to go back and read it to come up with characters for his later stories. Do you suppose while reading he was like "Damn this book is great, I wonder what'll happen next?"
You'll have to pry my Pratchett collection from my cold, dead hands.
I have never read all of his books because at some point I will have read his last book.
Sadly the quality was dipping for the last few. I didn't finish Unseen Academicals.
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When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the "new ones", and asked if she could help.
I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.
I don't know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio...
There's having 30 books, and 10.000 books. There's probably a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. No one needs 10.000 books.
No one need 10.000 books
Not with that attitude.
That reminds me of the section in Black Swan where Taleb talks about Umberto Eco's library:
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
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My apartment is 60% books. I don’t have enough bookshelves, I have most loaded to the point where they are bending and there are piles of books stacked on top. Stacks and stacks and stacks.
I think my library is almost an art project at this point. I thrift a lot, check out library discard sales and have a bunch of things I bought when you could get books on Amazon for a penny + shipping. I often pick up 5-10 a week, because at the thrift shop that’s maybe $10 at most. (Goodwill is getting precious, but the really ratty ones are often prime spots.)
Very little fiction. Mostly textbooks and history and language and arcane computer things and strange religious literature and philosophy and paranormal arcana. Obscure things - I mostly collect things that I wouldn’t normally be able to find in a library.
My ex hated my books and wanted to work out a deal where I’d have to give up two for every one I took in. Now I am free to live in a pile of stacks. I don’t care if it looks “messy” or “cluttered.” It represents my mind.
At least when you die and archeologist find your trove we'll be able to deep learn your stack in order to recreate a cyber you.
A goal of mine is to ensure that my library is preserved in some fashion after I die, because I do believe it would be valuable. Many of the books I have are out of print, rare, and obscure. I have a fantasy of a library room set aside with my collection - a couple of comfortable chairs in a little nook.
Especially with the way that AI has polluted information sources online, I think having a collection of the printed word which is guaranteed to be vetted and written by humans would be useful. The religious material I think also could be helpful in preserving history - eg, I have versions of Mormon books which are likely not consistent with current doctrine.
A buddy called me to fix some plumbing in a house he baught , he said the previous owners were hoarders. So I went over and the whole fucking basement was wall to wall book shelves with fucking isles!
He said the lady that owned the house was some eccentric type that hung out in NY back in the 50's around artists and writers, traveling the world etc. her husband was some sort of critic and they liked books.
I asked what he was doing with it all and he said he sold the contents of the house sight unseen to some guy that wanted it all and was going to be arriving any minute but if I wanted anything to take it now. My brain was scrambling, I didn't want to be a dick so I just grabbed two books; Tropic of Cancer and Future Shock ( and a bunch of lab equipment that was in a secretive back room lol). They were both first edition books and had newspaper clippings about Miller and Toffler among other reviews that were stuffed in the pages.
It was crazy because they had so much bad ass shit , old leather bound stuff etc. It was just too much to process and I hope it didn't all wind up in a dumpster. I wish I could have spent a few days pillaging those shelves.
"Throw out stuff so you can buy more" -- Maria Kondo
Miss me with that braindead shit.
She doesn't even follow her own system anymore because she had kids and her system doesn't work well for families she admits.
If you should keep one thing in life it's books.
I'm making a push to hoard my books a little more organized. With the space I have on my e-reader, I could easily have thousands of books.
And I intend to take advantage of that. And I think I might keep a local git repo just for the sake of making sure regex formatting changes don't fuck things up.
This shit seems weirdly disposal/consumerism focused.
Fuck all of this.
Well she is big on giveaways, as long as you’re not “cleaning“ while in fact dumping tons of junk on family members who are equally convinced “oh yeah maybe someday I’ll totally wear this…“
I'm not sure why you're conflating "don't hoard things you don't need" with consumerism.
There's certainly ways to do that irresponsibly, but it's not part of the philosophy.
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That means I would have to go to the library to borrow books I want to read and then really read them and turn them back in. I just want to buy books to sit on the shelf as I tell myself I will read them someday in the future.
Less than 30? That woman is goofy.
You can pry the books I never read out my cold dead hands!
(Feel free to suggest me some public domain books I can get from Gutenberg, maybe I will read them)
How do I actually read more? Like how do force myself to read a book. I have some cool books I'd like to read but it's hard to choose it over say a video game. I also have ADHD.
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Laughs in research library
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