There are moments where I really miss my Australia obsession.
I'm having that this morning.
Today, we're having some of our carpets replaced and stretched.
I decided it might be a good idea to make it easier on the carpet people, to move furniture, by emptying the furniture as much as possible.
Maybe 20% of this is kindness on my part. The rest is selfishness. I figure the less work they have, the faster they'll get their butts out of our house.
Okay, and you know what. The 80% isn't pure selfishness. Because I'm also doing it for Yeti and Annie (our cats). They get really anxious when we have people in our house.
Anyway, so I emptied two of my office bookshelves that were filled with mostly Australian books.
I took the books downstairs and placed them on the dining room table.
Then I decided, while I'm doing that, I might as well go through the books and find ones I no longer want to keep.
It's not the first time I've done a book culling since we began this adventure of downsizing/relocating. But I definitely need to lose more. Our current home is huge and has an abundant amount of built in bookshelves. Our next house is going to be about half the size, and I don't think it will have a lot of built in bookshelves.
So....
I went through the dining room table books and put books I wanted to keep on one side and bye bye books on the other side.
I'm keeping all novels that were my favorites and/or memorable to me. This includes Jaclyn Moriarty's The Spellbook of Listen Taylor, Lily Brett's Too Many Men, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet and The Riders. Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One, Ruth Park's Swords and Crowns and Rings and Playing Beattie Row, John Marsden's So Much to Tell You, Toni Jordan's Addition....
I'm keeping Peter Kocan's novels.
I kept a couple of Claire McNab's books. I enjoyed all the books I've read of hers, but I don't want to keep all of them. I don't remember which ones I liked more, so I'm just keeping the ones with cuter titles. Or really, I went by which Aussie animals I liked most. I gave up platypus, wombats, and dingoes and kept quokka's and kookaburras.
Of course I love ALL Australian animals. I think I just chose Quokkas because they're more obscure and for a long time my ring tone was Kookaburra's call.
I kept a book that wasn't an absolute favorite, but a friend gave it to me. Plus I definitely liked it enough.
I decided to keep books that I'd probably get rid of otherwise, but they have some type of water damage. I might as well keep them instead of trying to pawn them off to someone else.
I'm keeping all books published during and before 1988. I just like having old books. They feel treasure-like.
As for the books I'm farewelling They're mostly novels. Some I vaguely remember liking but I don't remember much about the actual story. So I don't have much of an emotional attachment. Or I remember them and have a small bit of attachment, but I feel they're better off finding new readers. And then there are some books I simply didn't like much.
