Blessed by the Potato

We are fairly well-read people (in the sense that we read a lot, not that we’ve read all the classics), and own a buttload of books. I keep trying to rename our dining room “the library” since it’s basically wallpapered in bookshelves, but the name hasn’t stuck yet. Now as we find it’s time to move, we’re faced with the task of moving these hundreds and hundreds of heavy, heavy books.

We just don’t wanna.

After all, a lot of them we’re never going to read again, or loan out to friends to read, so why hold on to them? In just a brief round of going through the bookshelves, we found 5 boxes worth of books to pull out and discard without the slightest regret (i.e.: books we had zero emotional connection to and would have no desire to read again). The question became: what to do with them? We figured that they had to be worth something, and kept planning to haul them down to the used bookstore to see what we could get. Even if it was just a dime a book, that’d make the trip down worthwhile since we had so many.

Unfortunately, our time has been quite tight lately, especially during business hours, so we just haven’t gotten around to doing it. Now we’ve got just a few days left before the big move, and the damned books are still sitting there in their boxes, and we don’t want to move them! So, abandoning our plan to recoup some of the costs of these tomes, we started looking for convenience. Just any way to get rid of them that would be a step above the recycling pile. Much to our surprise, the London Public Library makes book donations very hassle-free: we called in and set up an appointment for a fellow to come to our house and pick the books up.

And of course, we love the library now: we can read all the books we want without having to pay for — or store them!