He Who Dies With the Most Books, Wins

Now this is a topic I can get into. I have

Too Many Books. Says one side of my brain.

Another side says: What means this "too many books" please?

By one definition, I have too many: I have more books than I could read in the remainder of my life, no matter how long I live. Which is about a thousand books, I estimate.

MOVING

The last (and I do mean "last") time we moved, from one small suburban town to another about 5 miles away, we had professionals move the furniture, but for several days before that we moved the little stuff, including books, in our cars. Two-thirds of the dozen trips were just boxes of books.

It was at that point, after several moves over 20 years with increasing proportions of books to the total amount moved, that I finally understood when my

father had said to my mother, when I was 12, about the house they were about to buy, "Like it? You'd better decide for sure, because we're never moving again."

We're never moving again.

HOME LIBRARY

I once tried to make a list of my books. Fool's errand, and I only have maybe (rough estimate only) a thousand volumes or so - not up to the standards of some of you, I gather.

My kids both had bookshelves in their bedrooms, and are both dedicated readers, now grown. One daughter, as a teen, remarked wonderingly to me that when she visited the homes of her friends, she seldom saw books -- they didn't have bookshelves in the house, and none had bookshelves in the kids' rooms. She was disturbed by this.

Later, in college--USC no less--she remarked how few of her classmates ever read books. And in film school, of course, nobody apparently reads anything longer than 120 pages bound in pressboard covers.

I keep trying to winnow down my library but never seem to make a dent. It's a small miracle if I can get through the year without happening to visit the library book sale and making my problems worse.

What we all need, I think, is a good desert island....