Privilege Is: Having too many books
Jun. 2nd, 2013 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetCurrently weeding out my manga collection, trying to decide what stays, what gets sold, and what gets donated to AI for volunteer prizes.
These are the hard questions: Do I really need to keep this copy of the TokyoPop translation of Magic Knight Rayearth simply because it's from when it was still Mixx and i feel nostalgic, or do I keep the more up-to-date one because it's in somewhat better condition? Or should I just give away/sell all of them and pick up the recent non-TokyoPop omnibus versions? Will I really ever get around to re-reading Marmalade Boy or Kodocha, or can I say good-bye with little to no regret? Do I really need buy and/or keep everything CLAMP has ever written? (I'm looking at you, Tokyo Babylon!) How much manga do I really need that's in a language I can't read, even if I did drop a buttload of cash on it on our high school orchestra Europe trip? (It's in German, for the record; Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne 1 thru 7 and Detective Conan 1 thru 10 plus scattered other volumes. They weren't out in the US at the time, and the price of one volume of manga was about half of what it was here. And that was on the cheap end.)
And then there's books. I've been nigh obsessively collecting the works of Patricia C. Wrede, but I don't have a lot of luck getting through them. (I have a signed copy of The Seven Towers that I somehow managed to make it through and will probably hold onto, but The Harp of Immsomething was just too much and I found the language of Snow White and Rose Red, while probably reasonably accurate to the time period, to be a barrier to my enjoyment. I haven't touched either of the Lyra novels yet, nor Daughter of Witches.) And I love me some Mrs Pollifax, but there's really not much point in keeping all of these books if I'm never going to read them. Then there's the books that my mom got me for my birthday one year, signed by a local author very specifically (and somewhat embarrassingly) to me, but I couldn't get past more than a few chapters of the first one. What the hell do I do with those? I have three individual copies of Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, which I am assured is fantastic but couldn't make it through. (This was more a matter of personal taste than of quality, actually. It's one of those fantasy settings that shows no signs of having actual fantastical elements, which. Er. I'm not particularly keen on. Someone tell me otherwise and I'll give the book another go!) There's at least a few books I have more than one copy of, so I can lend or give away the extras to friends, but I've never gotten around to it.
*sigh* It's hard cleaning out a personal library. I may put up a post seeking new homes for some of these, but I might also just take them to Half Price Books and be done with it, instead.
These are the hard questions: Do I really need to keep this copy of the TokyoPop translation of Magic Knight Rayearth simply because it's from when it was still Mixx and i feel nostalgic, or do I keep the more up-to-date one because it's in somewhat better condition? Or should I just give away/sell all of them and pick up the recent non-TokyoPop omnibus versions? Will I really ever get around to re-reading Marmalade Boy or Kodocha, or can I say good-bye with little to no regret? Do I really need buy and/or keep everything CLAMP has ever written? (I'm looking at you, Tokyo Babylon!) How much manga do I really need that's in a language I can't read, even if I did drop a buttload of cash on it on our high school orchestra Europe trip? (It's in German, for the record; Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne 1 thru 7 and Detective Conan 1 thru 10 plus scattered other volumes. They weren't out in the US at the time, and the price of one volume of manga was about half of what it was here. And that was on the cheap end.)
And then there's books. I've been nigh obsessively collecting the works of Patricia C. Wrede, but I don't have a lot of luck getting through them. (I have a signed copy of The Seven Towers that I somehow managed to make it through and will probably hold onto, but The Harp of Immsomething was just too much and I found the language of Snow White and Rose Red, while probably reasonably accurate to the time period, to be a barrier to my enjoyment. I haven't touched either of the Lyra novels yet, nor Daughter of Witches.) And I love me some Mrs Pollifax, but there's really not much point in keeping all of these books if I'm never going to read them. Then there's the books that my mom got me for my birthday one year, signed by a local author very specifically (and somewhat embarrassingly) to me, but I couldn't get past more than a few chapters of the first one. What the hell do I do with those? I have three individual copies of Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, which I am assured is fantastic but couldn't make it through. (This was more a matter of personal taste than of quality, actually. It's one of those fantasy settings that shows no signs of having actual fantastical elements, which. Er. I'm not particularly keen on. Someone tell me otherwise and I'll give the book another go!) There's at least a few books I have more than one copy of, so I can lend or give away the extras to friends, but I've never gotten around to it.
*sigh* It's hard cleaning out a personal library. I may put up a post seeking new homes for some of these, but I might also just take them to Half Price Books and be done with it, instead.
