I've Love BIG Books and I Cannot Lie

Books were my best friends as a child.  I loved reading them, falling asleep with them, living vicariously through them, artfully stacking them on tables and arranging them in interesting ways on my bookshelves.  I miss card catalogs and wonder if kids are still taught the Dewey Decimal System in school.

I remember experiencing life on the prairie in A Lantern in Her Hand and wanting to be like Jo in Little Women.  I discovered Kurt Vonnegut as a teenager and feet like I'd been let in on a great cosmic joke after reading Breakfast of Champions.  I became enamored with the dashing rogues and delightful damsels of romance novels in my late teens until I discovered the wonderful world of non-fiction and all of the real life heroes & heroines in the world.  Then I spent a few years scaring myself to sleep with Stephen King's twisted masterpieces.

I moved into the New Age in my 20s and followed Shirley MacClaine & Edgar Cayce around the world and back through time.  Og Mandino, Emmet Fox, Eckhart Tolle & Stephen Covey were the cause of many paradigm shifts in my 30s and then I met Christopher Moore's character Biff, Christ's childhood pal in his novel Lamb.  Talk about a paradigm shift!  I fell in love with this comic romp through ancient times from the very first line, "The angel was cleaning out his closet when the call came." 

When a friend recommended Joan Brady's, God on a Harley, my world changed again.  The very idea of God coming back to give us each our own set of commandments and then taking the time to help the main character clean out her closet made inordinately happy.

I met my soul sister, Sarah Ban Breathnach, a few years ago when I finally got around to reading Simple Abundance.  I was a little busy raising my son in the late 90s when it came out.  I am so grateful I finally picked it up and found much comfort & joy the world she created with her words.


I stumbled upon Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy about 10 years ago and felt much the same way I did when I read Vonnegut for the first time.  I've always been fascinated by the idea of parallel universes and Sawyer's idea of an earth where Neanderthals became the dominant species and then a barrier between the two worlds is breached found me at just the right time in my life.  Around this time, I devoured Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth & World Without End then sobbed my heart out at the soul wrenching twist at the end The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell.

I could go on and on, about how specific books & authors have shaped me and saved me.  For now, this is a lovely walk down memory lane for me and hopefully an inspiration for you to read more books!  It's also a good reminder that even though I had already let go of many of these books before starting this radical downsizing, the power of the stories is always with me.  That reminder makes this process of letting go of most of my books much easier today.

The books I'm keeping (for now).

As much as I love books, I never amassed a large collection.  I regularly donate or give my books away when I'm done with them.  I always suggest to my clients to use their bookshelves as parameters and if they start to overflow then it's time to edit their collections.  As a result, I don't have a lot of books to put in my sale, but those that I'm letting go of are meaningful to me.  The ones I'm keeping are dog eared and highlighted and books that will read and reference over & over again throughout my life.


I am grateful for my Kindle and it will definitely come in handy during this minimalism part of my journey.  However, I still hold the dream of having a a home with a room dedicated to books.  For today, I'll rely on the library card and digital downloads.