Lost in the Stacks

This is the tale of a nasty book-buying addiction; I'm sure you can commiserate. 

My husband and I bought our first house just over a year ago now. It was an exciting time for both of us: we were newly engaged, planning a wedding. We both found this house separately, each on a different real estate site, and when it turned out that the houses that we were each so excited about turned out to be the same house we knew we had to have it.  In order to afford it and eat and pay for a wedding, some sacrifices were going to have to be made. I was going to have to stop buying so many books. 

I put a system in place: I could still buy books five or six at a time, but I couldn't buy the next five or six until those were finished and this worked for a time. Husband and my original libraries were still in boxes in our Norristown, PA apartment, and when we moved, some thirty or forty rubberneck bins of books came with us.  

I've finally started unpacking my books this fall, and I did some math. For every five or six books that I had bought before the move, I'd read maybe one, leaving something around 80% of my library unread. Most of my library is still in boxes: we don't have enough room in our house to display all of them. My office is a mess of boxes and books, and I can't work in there because of it. To fix this problem, I've instituted a new system I call the Clearing: for every new book purchased, one book from the stacks must be read, and then a decision made: keep or give away. 

The Clearing starts tonight with Cloud Atlas.