Today I packed most of the stuff I have to take to university with me. I also cleared out some of my bookshelves to make room for the books that I've bought and have been stacked on my desk for ages because there's nowhere to put them.
I have a fairly well-established arrangement for my bookshelves. They're arranged vaguely by genre, although a lot of disparate books end up next to each other because I put them there years ago and never got round to rearranging them. So I have a shelf of historical fiction... apart from The Black Magician trilogy, which is a high-fantasy series. I have a shelf of mostly urban fantasy, with some Latin-language books, Gabriel García Márquez, and a bunch of Balkan writers among them. And I have the shelf which until now was entirely filled with the contemporary YA I read in my YAhood, and is now a mix of my Scarlett Thomas collection, my few remaining YA light reads, and a bunch of disparate stuff that's been waiting for a new home (includes: Umberto Eco, the steampunk Burton & Swinburne series, José Saramago, and an Inspector Renko book). I have so many books in a stack on my floor, that's ready to be moved elsewhere: Skullduggery Pleasant, my Sarah Dessen books, the Truth Dare Kiss Promise series, Heist Society, books I got in proof copy from relatives who work in bookshops...
Most of it I haven't read in years. They're not great literature, and I probably won't miss them when they're gone. I needed more space on my bookshelves, and I needed to clear them out anyway. But there were a lot of books which even though I could probably have cleared them out - my Georgia Nicholson collection, Sara Manning's books, the children's historical fiction I devoured a decade ago - I can't bear to remove. I've already moved all my Diana Wynne Jones, the Abhorsen series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Roman Mysteries to my sister's room (where she doesn't read them, because she's not really a reader). It's sad to search my bookshelves for them and remember that they aren't here. And in a little over a year I'll have graduated uni and be living somewhere that isn't my parents' house (nothing to do with not wanting to live with my family - there's just no jobs where I live) and there's no way I'll be able to take all these with me, and I'll probably have to do another culling.
Then there's all the books I've bought for my uni courses. A lot of them are big, and take up a lot of space, and are very specialised, and I could resell them for a decent amount of money. I probably will, bar a few books that are more readable and not specialised academic stuff (since I do have a sizeable number of nonfiction books). But as it is I can flick through them and see the progression of what I've been studying for the last four years, and I do feel strangely attached to them even though I probably will have to sell them on after I graduate.
This isn't a post with much of a point, other than that it's sad to have to get rid of the books you've owned for years but are no longer read and need to make way for new ones. I can absolutely understand why I'm doing it, but I wish I just had magically expanding bookshelves....
