100 book challenge: part five: comics, art books, graphic design

[sleepingjpb]

Thirty books left to go in the 100 Book Challenge!

Last time I left off on the cusp of "comics," so let's proceed into that realm. I'm fortunate that a lot of the comics I want to bring are actually in comics form, in long-boxes under my bed, and are thus exempt from the purge. But in terms of "trade paperbacks," let's see.

• 
  Watchmen, by Alan

Comments

[angela_la_la]

So how many books do you have, exactly? Since I've already pared my collection down considerably, it feels like cheating to get to pick 100--I only have 500.

Will you be posting a list of your discards so all the literary vultures might swoop down and have a go? ;)

[angela_la_la]

Of course, if we are to discuss cheating, one might bring up that you have already posted a total of 100 books. Heh.

[sleepingjpb]

I'm not exactly sure how many I have. Or had, rather: I've been culling from the bottom all the time I've been culling from the top: I took about seven boxes of my worst and least favorite books to the used bookstore this week.

What that leaves is a large middle ground of stuff that's not good enough to be in the top 100, and too good to readily wish myself free of. When I'm through with this exercise perhaps I'll count them and post them as a list and see if I can put some of them in good homes.

[angela_la_la]

Damn. I don't have much middle ground in my books, since I've been on my regimen of book-purges: now, all my books are either very special to me and I would never part with them, or they are totally disposable. I "rent" lots of 25-cent books from the local thrift which go straight back there when I'm done. Examples of this from my current pile are Kitchen Confidential and Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, both of which were fine books but which I'll probably never read a second time. Slaughterhouse 5, on the other hand, I've read twice this YEAR.

Frankly, I consider books to be an integral part of the home and thus exclude them from any mental exercises regarding what I don't "need". They're structural features, in some emotional way. Most of the shit I lost in the latest round of basement flooding, on the other hand? Good riddance! Six rolls of Christmas wrap? Gone! WinXP manuals, expired bottles of hand lotion, limp origami flowers, old cat toys, scraps of faded felt: all packed into trash bags, never to be missed.