Skip to main content

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

If you read a lot of books like we do, perhaps you share our problem: Our home is gradually getting overrun by books. Piles of them.

Sure, we've made resolutions to control the spread of our collection, like "no more buying books!" and "only get books out of the library!" We've tried these approaches, but unfortunately, not only do rules like these suck the fun out of life, they're also ineffective. The thing is, even though we do get most of our books out of the library, and we don't really make a practice of buying books, we somehow still seem to have more books than we know what to do with. And the piles seem to grow, slowly but surely, with every month and year.

Earlier this year, however, we adopted a simple strategy to control our book creep, and it has worked so well for us that I decided to share it with you in this blog:

For every new book you bring into your home, you must immediately remove two.

It doesn't matter whether you donate the books to a local charity book sale, Bookmooch them, or just give them away. The point is, you must get those two books out of your home. Right now.

The key advantage to this rule is this: you can still enjoy the pleasure of receiving or buying new books, yet over time you will be guaranteed to reduce the number of books you own. Just make sure that the minute a new book arrives in the mail, or the minute you return from your trip to Barnes & Noble, you pick out the requisite two books per new book acquired and get them out of your home forever.

You can also set the number of "removal books" to three, four or more, depending on how aggressively you want to reduce your book collection. Just don't set this number below two: the whole point is to make sure that each time you acquire a book it results in a net reduction of the total number of books you own.

Try this rule and see if it helps you control your out-of-control book collection. Let me know how it works for you!
Labels:

More Posts

Inflation: The Problems It Creates and the Policies It Requires by Arthur M. Okun, Henry H. Fowler, and Milton Gilbert

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...
Read more

Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman

[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.] Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility. Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and s...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more