This is not a book review, yet it’s related to books. My wife and I have accumulated a lot of books over the years. Three rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of books acquired through schooling, second-hand stores, roadside boxes marked ‘Free’, airport kiosks and can’t-miss gifts from family and friends. I’m in my 40s now and I realize that a time is coming when we must downsize our book collection significantly because of our growing family (a child’s room is not an appropriate place to store old college textbooks) and general aesthetic decorum.

Yet, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to part with books. I can’t part with old or new books alike. I agreed that we needed to reduce the book collection, but I asked my wife to run all to-be-discarded books by me first. The typical result: A pile of 10 or so books is reduced to one or two, so progress has been a tad slow. Why is this so hard? I’m a relentless minimalist is other areas of life. I’m quick to part with stuff and my wardrobe is bafflingly small. But for some reason, books are tethered to my psyche.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently and I think it’s a symptom of middle age. First, my school days don’t feel that far in the past, so my affection for my undergraduate and graduate textbooks is still present. In a sense, they represent my younger self during a time when I truly loved the ocean of ideas I swam in. The information in those books is now two decades old. Is it still relevant? Have the ideas and data held up? I can’t be certain but knowing those old ideas, I feel, could still be valuable. The path of ideas through time is always imperfect, tossed around and shaken like panning for gold that, I would argue, often loses some nuggets because the filter is too narrow. When I see my old textbooks, I often think, “Huh, I bet there is something in there that’s applicable to me and my work today.” What have I forgotten? What would inspire me? It’s a bit neurotic, but honestly, when I place a book in a recycling bin or pack it into a box for charity, I have a momentary image of that book being shredded. For older books, that image is almost unbearable. It’s a step closer to extinction for that literary species, and when it’s gone, you likely can’t bring it back. It will be lost to history, lost to study, and lost to humanity. IBM’s Watson database is restricted to sources like PubMed, which only goes back to the late 1940s. The scientists and theorists not represented there were still awfully smart people who thought deeply about their subjects. How much has been lost? Il n’y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié.

Second, I’m still young enough to think that I’ll one day read the many, many intriguing books on our shelves. I know this is absurd; at the rate I’m going (maybe 10 books a year), I’ll never get through them all, and that’s if I stopped accumulating more books, which is equally absurd. I’ve read Tim Urban’s sobering Wait But Why post that visualizes a lifetime remaining. But which book will the future me pick up and when are open-ended questions that I can’t answer. In a way, the books we hope to read are a reflection of who we hope to become. In another twenty years, I would think that I will more easily give up my academic materials and the thought of years and years of future reading.

The last reason I cannot discard books is that I love being surrounded by them. I love seeing them. Their spines are short visual cues that trigger memories and ideas. I’d hate to lose that in favor of tidiness. Also, I want my young children to grow up surrounded by lots of books too, so they can see the planents of the literary universe close by. The books are a constant reminder that you are free to explore new worlds of characters and ideas. The house I grew up in had perhaps two shelves of books in a den room. You had to seek them out, they were not present. As a result, I’m sure I read much less than I could have as a child. (The first books I remember truly loving were Duane Decker’s young adult baseball fiction and the Doc Savage adventure series – not exactly contemporary stuff in the 1980s. I was anachronistic even back then. ) I’ve never been a hardcore e-book reader. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I suspect that it has more to do with my desire to have physical reminders of the places my mind has traveled.

Today I discarded four books: Three old textbooks and a bland novel. I think I need a decision tree to help me with this but the only rule I’ve decided on is: Is the book yours? You can’t toss your wife’s books, that’s for sure.