Packing Up My Library for the Move

I’m moving in less than two weeks, so I’ve been packing, packing, packing books. This past week I packed up my personal library. I haven’t had much mental energy for writing.

In 2000 I started auctioning off my library to downsize so I could move. But then I had such monetary success that I began selling books and have been doing so for eight years. My original intent was thereby thwarted. I have increased my library tenfold.

How happy I was when I opened a box from storage and saw that I had not gotten rid of my Heinlein books or any books from the Pern series. I’ve hardly read any fiction in the past eight years. And I don’t read nearly as much as I used to simply because I don’t have a nightstand with a good lamp or a current reading glass prescription. I also lack a reading lamp and a good chair in my family room. I will remedy this in my new home.

As I was packing, I was thrilled over so many of the titles that I haven’t read yet: Rational Bacteriology; Hidden Killers: The Revolutionary Medical Discoveries of Professor Guenther Enderlein; Blood and Its Third Anatomical Element; The Hundred-Year Lie: How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health; Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News; Immunization: The Reality Behind the Myth. So many wonderful books ripening on my shelf just waiting for me to open and consume, like fresh summer fruit.

But so much of the content of these books is over my head, so I also have numerous biology, physiology and anatomy books to study. This past summer I would often sit on my lounge chair, my naked back to the early afternoon sun, eating ripe organic watermelon and reading Molecular Biology of the Cell. The information is so dense that I could read only three or four pages before saturation. And then the next time I sat to read I would have forgotten half of it. How do students do it? How do they take several classes at a time and remember all this stuff?

A woman who owns a nonprofit is coming by today to pick up books I’m donating. These are books that are no longer profitable online because of saturation. She’s just starting her business, so this will definitely help her, and it helps me because I don’t have to move the books.

So please be patient and don’t abandon my blog thinking I’m no longer invested in it. I will be able to offer more content when I’m moved into my new home, when the weight of the move doesn’t take up so much psychic real estate.