"It's better than sex! It's BOOKS!"

[serinde]

audiovile just sent me the best quote EVAR:

"I am still in the thrall of one insatiable desire, which hitherto I have been neither able nor willing to check. I cannot get enough books. It may be that I have already more than I need, but it is with books as it is with other things: success in acquisition spurs the desire to get still more. Books, indeed, have a special charm. Gold, silver, gems, purple raiment, a house of marble, a well-tilled field, paintings, a steed with splendid trappings -- things such as these give but a silent and superficial pleasure. Books delight us through and through, they talk with us, they give us good counsel, they enter into a living and intimate companionship with us. What is more, not only does a book win the reader's affection for itself, but it mentions the names of other books, so that one stirs the desire for another." -- Petrarch

I love the universe again.

Comments

[mangosteen]

I'm with you on that, right up until the point where I've finished reading the book, at which point it becomes "an albatross wrought of paper and glue, to be dispatched at the earliest opportunity."

This view is subject to change, pending moving into a place that I actually own (three weeks!!!!).

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

So when your brain dies, the knowledge in the books disappears? Shame.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Part of Steve's reason for sending it at me was in memory of when we packed for moving into our house. I exerted my will and agreed to throw out three, yes, THREE books, though not without much agonizing.

(They were some horrible hack crap I'd inherited from my first boyfriend, pseudo-military fiction, Mack Bolan's Able Team or some shite. But, I mean, throwing away books...)

[mangosteen]

Mack Bolan's Able Team or some shite.

The classification is "Adventure Fiction". Sony's "My First Tom Clancy Book."

I exerted my will and agreed to throw out three, yes, THREE books, though not without much agonizing.

So, um, yeah. There are three boxes of books that are going away (likely to the Boston Public Library's collection, or the book sale of same). It took about twenty minutes to do the requisite weeding.

That was after the five-box book purge a few months earlier. I credit my sweetie (you know, the librarian), for the aggressive stance on book weeding. A book collection, to my view, should be a living thing.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I can't help it, I'm a complete stuff-ist. I find it hard to throw anything away because it might be useful. (And sometimes it has been!! STOP LAUGHING, STEVE.) With books, there's that, but also the problem that I have some mental thing that visualizes them almost at the "pet" level. I know it's insane, but there it is. Can't abandon a kitten, can't abandon a book.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I've been fighting the Accumulation Of Stuff, mostly unsuccessfully, for the past 5.5 years. At least my apartment is big enough now that the books aren't completely eating it. Yet.