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Bookish Death Cleaning: On What We Keep, and What It Means

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Bookish Death Cleaning: On What We Keep, and What It Means

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Bookish Death Cleaning: On What We Keep, and What It Means

Have you ever been concerned that you'll never read all the books on your shelves, let alone everything else you want to read?

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Published on March 14, 2024

Photo by Eugenio Mazzone [via Unsplash]

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Photograph of a bookshelf with old hardback books stacked at various angles.

Photo by Eugenio Mazzone [via Unsplash]

Most days, I look at my books and find a whole mess of positive feelings: Memories of the experience I had reading them; snippets of story; fond thoughts about characters I adored; themes or feelings or ideas that I still carry tucked in my pockets. The unread books are hope, things not yet learned, characters not yet met. The TBR stacks I can never seem to unstack are wishes: I will read this next. I will read this before I start work on that project. I will read this. There will be time.

And some days I want to chuck them all out a window. (Metaphorically speaking. I would never, not really.)

Okay, not all the books. Some? Most? A fraction? It’s not a decluttering urge that brings me to this place, though I understand that temptation, which lurks in the part of my brain that asks Why do you need this are you going to read it again what is it for do you think it looks nice what about this book that there is no room for on the shelf? No, what gets under my skin is something else, something slippery and unavoidable, something I’m trying to be more comfortable with: Mortality. Just plain old ordinary mortality, in the form of a thought: What will become of all of this?

While this isn’t a pressing concern yet—I hope—as I age, as death comes for people closer to me, as the world continues to turn and continues to burn, I find myself wondering: Where is the tipping point? What happens? What do I keep forever? What feels like a piece of who I am? What meaning does this collection have to anyone else?

I am no minimalist. I once joked that if I ever could fit all my stuff in a Mini Cooper, I should be allowed to buy a Mini Cooper, the joke being that this will literally never happen. Most of my stuff is paper: Books, notebooks, journals, copies of a weekly paper I used to work for, more books, yet more books, notebooks stuffed full of ticket stubs and mementos. My books tell a story about who I am, what I value, what matters to me. But it will only matter to me, and only for so long.

And so I keep finding myself thinking about the act, the art, of collecting, of picking and choosing what matters, what we keep, and what—ultimately—we want to deal with later. I think about the digital clutter of unorganized photos, old blogs, little bits of myself scattered around the internet. 

Books have always been separate from this train of thought, not a collection but a kind of mental necessity. What is a home for if not to fill it with books? What would I do without them? I can’t get rid of these stories, even though I’ve internalized them. They’re part of me. They’re mine, and the physical reminder of that needs to be here, on the shelf, too rarely dusted. 

Does it, though? 

My partner and I joke about Swedish death cleaning like it’s a hobby. We don’t have kids; we don’t know who would want our old mementos. Who cares about the weird, massive keychain—a bundle of other keychains smashed together like some terrible mutant—I for some reason carried all through high school? What about cheap earrings in the shape of the Legend of Zelda’s Triforce? What about this old copy of Sophie’s World with the name of everyone I ever lent it to written on the inside cover? Plastic unicorns from the mystery boxes that I can never resist when in the checkout line at Powell’s? What is any of this for?

“Books, even ones I desperately want to read, still have to have a limit. Because truly, the more I buy, the less I read,” Vanessa Ogle writes in “On Book Hoarding and the Perilous Paradox of Clutter.” I have tried to do that math, the math that tracks books in and books read. I tried it for about a month and immediately grew tired of it; it missed the point. The point was that when I buy books, I’m spending money on the idea of the book, the idea of being the person who reads it. If I buy more, do I read less? No, there is always more to read. Always more to buy. There is always another story.

And there’s always another story to tell myself about why I have all these books. They’re my library, my memory; they’re also my nostalgia, for better or worse, for having been the person who read some of these books, and the person who dreamed of reading others. I am comforted by the fact that I will never be without something new to read, but I’m also, absurdly, concerned that I will never read all the things already on my shelves, let alone everything else I want to read. It’s not a real problem. It’s a luxury. But there it is, in my thoughts.

I would like there to be a simple reason for this, a single thing that sent me into a series of thoughts about death and life and what happens to our things, but there isn’t. There is instead an endless series of things: a death in the family, thousands of deaths in the news, the warmest winter on record, piles of discarded fast fashion in other countries, friends’ pets dying, more deaths in the news, war, famine, the list goes on. Maybe, though, it’s not a bad thing to think these slightly morbid thoughts about what I have, what I am, and what happens to all of it. In Make Your Art No Matter What, Beth Pickens talks about “death acceptance,” which is a practice of cultivating a specific relationship to death and grief: “Learning to tolerate and make some peace with the fear and dread is how my brain, slowly and over time, changes to be more in the present, able to endure grief and discomfort.”

Later, she writes, “Where there is death, there is art, and vice versa.”

Sometimes thinking about death acceptance feels like a privilege. Death comes for us all; many of us don’t even have time to think about it. Sometimes it feels like a necessity, for all the reasons Pickens lists. And sometimes, it just turns into thoughts about things, about what we leave behind, about why I have things, whether I want things, whether it’s time to shed another layer or reframe my relationship to what I have and who I am. Most of my trains of thought lead back to stories, in the weird and winding paths of my mind. But the story of a book as an object—the story I impose on my books, whenever I look at them—is not the same as the story it contains. No one else will pick up a specific copy of a book and know the experience you or I had reading it. You can’t pass that on, not without writing it down yourself. What is a collection without its collector?

What do you want to happen to your books? What are they, to you? Are you a keeper or a giver-away, a collector or a borrower? Do they have a future in your family, or with your friends, or on the shelves of the bookstore next door? Does it matter to you? Do you think about it, about what happens to the pieces of a life?   icon-paragraph-end

About the Author

Molly Templeton

Author

Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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10 months ago

I don’t know that any of my possible heirs have the interest and ability to preserve my bookhoard, so the solution I’ve arrived at is simply not to die. So far, I have been almost entirely successful.

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Zack
10 months ago

“No one else will pick up a specific copy of a book and know the experience you or I had reading it. You can’t pass that on, not without writing it down yourself.”

Even then, you’re not passing on your experience so much as a transliteration of your subjective view of your experience.

Besides which, who would even want that? Scholars, perhaps, but in that case there’s a lot more I need to get in order than my bookshelves.

Let people see the books I had. Let my loved ones take from those the ones they associate with me, and have their own experiences. Let my enemies weep and rend their clothing upon seeing what the signed ones sell for.

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Misti
10 months ago

My mother died earlier this year and I’ve been confronted with the reality that what was to her a comfortable home, is now (mostly) unwanted things that her children have to get rid of. So I’ve been ruthlessly cleaning out my own home. With no partner and no kids, I look at my stuff and think about what will happen to it. And then I look at my library. When I die there will be a room full of books to deal with. I’ve already told my nieces and nephews they can take any of them they want (which probably won’t be many) and then they will be donated to my local library for their annual used book sale. I suspect when I’m dead I won’t really care what happens to them, but I hope they find new homes.

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10 months ago
Reply to  Misti

Yes. My mom died 2 years ago and I had lived with her for the last 10 years. Going through all her stuff is an ongoing process. She loved what she had, but neither my sister nor I want it particularly. I have been donating it in batches – the sewing and crafting batch to her sewing group, the gardening batch to the garden club, and so on. Her Western history books and art collection went to the local museum for a fundraiser.

For my own books, I started switching to ebooks for most things several years back, so at this point my physical book collection is relatively small – only 500 volumes or so, and most of that either signed or special editions. I am considering leaving a note in my papers for my nieces about how to sell them when the time comes.

I sometimes fantasize about having only enough stuff to fit in a van, but that would mean parting with my favorite overstuffed chair and other furniture that I still enjoy having. And possibly all the cat furniture, too. :-)

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Kyna
9 months ago

I, too, would be foiled my cat’s furniture :)

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Medrith
10 months ago

This is a very important article for me right now. My (younger) brother, who lived 130 miles away, has died unexpectedly, without a will. His heirs are a brother who lives about 300 miles away , and me, and I’m the administrator of his estate. I’ve been working on dealing with his stuff for 4 months now, and hope to finish in another 2 months. My husband and I do have children and grandchildren, and we also have a LOT more stuff than my late brother did. We’ve made sure that they know what’s in our wills and where they are, and they assure us it’s no problem, they’ll take care of it…We don’t want them to have the struggle I’m having now, but we aren’t done with our stuff.

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Susan Davis
10 months ago

It’s sooner than that — I have 71 boxes in the basement full of books that I’ve mostly replaced with Kindle versions that I need to find a disposition for. The ones I care about most, I have in hardback, and will keep, but my paperbacks that I have electronically need to find their way to new hands.

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George D Forman
10 months ago

this speaks to me. I DO have more books than I can possibly read and, yet, I still acquire more. I have made improvements to my lifestyle. I get more books from my local Library. Unfortunately some of the books I want to read are available only electronically from the library and, try as I might, I cannot get comfortable reading books on an electronic device. So, those few books, I buy used copies. I recycle a lot of books piling up books read and not worth keeping to take to Goodwill. So I’m much better than I used to be. I plan on purging my personal library if and when I need to leave my home because that will result in a much smaller place, I’m sure. I tend to follow books down a rabbit hole, seeing a book mentioned in a book I’m reading, seeing a book mentioned in a review, or discovering a book in various other ways. Those times make me want to read a book that is often old and new to me. when I acquire one of those when the library does not have it, I tend to read it right away and put it in the recycle pile. Loved this article

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Nancy AKK
9 months ago

I tooo find myself following various “trails” and mentions to more books that I just have to read!

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10 months ago

Thank you Molly for this piece. When my surrogate grandmother died she left me her books, because we shared a love for them. She’d worked in a library and had many discontinued library books with barcodes still on them. But of course I ended up only choosing a select few that reminded me most of her and wasn’t able to take them all. Maybe that’s fine: our loved ones looking at our collections & choosing the stories they care about most, like the core memories they choose to keep of us. Only small pieces of ourselves living on in and with others. Dust in the wind, and all that.

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Epiphyta
10 months ago

Molly, as someone who owns a Mini Cooper, you’d be surprised at how much can fit into one!

Most of my hard copies came from thrift shops/used bookstores, and I’m fine with the majority returning there; there are notes for my children about the signed editions. My Nook is 10 years old next month and much of the personal library lives there and on a backup hard drive or two (stupid vision problems).

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10 months ago

Lois McMaster Bujold was right that, “A man’s library gives information about the shape of his mind the way his clothing gives information about the shape of his body.” (_Komarr_)

I look at (all) the books around me and how they show the shape of my mind: shapes it took in the past, shapes it might have now, shapes I wanted it to take. Now my eyes are goofy; I can’t easily read physical books; yet I’m still surrounded by towering bookcases. Far too many are not available in e-editions, so holding onto a copy is the only option for ever reading or rereading them. When I first started going to conventions, 30-some years ago, there were panels on how to maintain and curate a collection. Now the panels are about disposing of them. It’s far too easy to say do this or do that, but even leaving aside that I’d rather my carefully-curated collection go to an appreciative connoisseur, there’s the sheer mass of volumes. It’d be such a massive effort to get boxes, box them, haul them off (anywhere), that despairing inertia sets in, and I scurry to comfort-read a familiar friend.

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Frances Grimble
10 months ago

My husband and I are childfree seniors in good health. What has made me think about death is Covid and the fact that society is now doing very little to prevent its spread. People die, people get long Covid, and no one seems to care.

My husband and I have literally thousands of books in our personal library. Several hundred of them are unread and in our designated bookcases for unread books. We love being able to choose whatever we want to read at the moment. We refuse to think of our books as a chore that we are responsible for getting through somehow, either by reading them or throwing them away. We read every day. We discuss the books we read with each other. Our books are doing their job: To make us happy. They do not need to have any practical value (but some of them do).

We have no nieces or nephews, no younger relatives at all. Our estate will go entirely to charities. They can do some work for the assets by holding an estate sale. If we actually had relatives, we’d feel the same way. The decluttering movement has done a huge disservice by making people think their possessions are nothing but a burden to the owners and to everyone else. It also does seniors a huge disservice by urging their direct heirs and all younger people to tell seniors they are going to die, maybe soon; so they should get on with it, throw everything out, and move to assisted living. In general, that seniors should go hide in a corner and not bother anyone, before or after death.

Nope. I’m going to enjoy my books! Also, did I mention my sewing fabric stash and my crochet yarn stash?

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