Culling the Herd, aka How We Outgrow Books

I’m slowly but surely packing books and culling those that are not making the cross-country trek via relocube. At current count, I have something like 35 boxes of books, and that includes several shelves worth of Old and Middle English texts and all of my Arthurian lit. Have I mentioned that my true love is Arthurian lit? The majority of those books, though, are fiction and the majority of fiction are YA and kids books. Why? Many of them are old friends, and it’s hard to break that habit. Except when you’re moving across country and you realize that you’re really just not as close to those old friends as you were.

As a kid, I read indiscriminately. There was the one half of my brain that devoured every sf/fantasy novel I could get a hold of, starting with the big world-builders and working my way through. Tolkien, Bradley, McCaffrey, L’Engle, LeGuin, Norton (Andre, not the Lit anthologies), Beagle: these were the grand masters of my childhood, followed by the more recent ‘upstarts’ in terms of Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, Pamela Dean, Diane Duane, Tamora Pierce, Patricia C Wrede, Sherwood Smith… Jr. and High school were about swallowing whole new worlds as fast as I could find them. I examined world-building from every angle and accessed every detail, adding each to my repertoire to await the day that I built my own world. Add to that a mix of LM Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott and Francis Hodgeson Burnett, and you have a really stodgy, clunky bit of writing that I did as a kid. Thank god I outgrew that — to an extent.

But mixed with those ‘classics’ per se were the trashier, less ‘highfalutin’ and highbrow “There’s a Boy in the Girls Bathroom” style books. Tween melodrama, ghost stories, one last sob stories and romance — I read every single one. I read my way through Naylor’s Alice books and collected Babysitter’s Club like they were going out of style. And I’ve finally realized that I can’t justify the shelf space for all these books anymore. They’re just as valid old friends as Montgomery and McCaffrey and McKinley, but we’re not kindred spirits anymore. We might talk once every year or so, but we don’t friend each other on Facebook. And we certainly don’t email or call.

So I culled. I culled books out of print for forty years, half of Scholastic’s Young Readers line and anything that I hadn’t picked up in five years or more. I culled stacks that the niecelings (the oldest is nine) are still too young for, and would they even want to read them, being books of the eighties and themselves children of the 21st century? I’ll donate them to my local library, to my local school teacher friends, in hopes of inspiring another kid the way I was inspired and temporarily swept away. It’s hard, sometimes, admitting that you’ve grown out of something.

I think that’s why I prefer the current trend of YA novels, which seem so much smarter and edgier and more straddling that strange place between childhood and adulthood that teens seem to reside in. I literally made the jump from Babysitters Club to Stephen King in one summer, so my reading habits were skewed (if that’s the right word) for years. I can read YA and kids books and not feel like my intelligence is being insulted, still caught up in the emotional whirlwind that seems true to what I remember from that time fifteen years ago.

I kept the books that are old friends, the ones whose meaning seems to deepen with each year. I still cheer on the Young Wizards and fight the good fight in Tortall and wonder if we’ll ever see more of Damar. I still have a house in each world, revisiting it once a season and learning a little something new with each reading (OMG, Luthe and Aerin had sex? Holy crud!).

The point? I don’t know. That books are like people, that some are passing acquaintances who are fun and some are part of your heart that touch your lives forever. That you can find bits of their worlds in mine, and that the story goes ever on and on, out from the book where it began.