Books: Hoarding vs Re-Reading

About five years ago, after being reunited with my Dr Who books, I realized that reading them no longer brought me joy.  Instead, it left me a little depressed at the loss of that childhood pleasure.  I thought about keeping them for the sake of having an impressive collection -- I'd picked most of them up at second-hand bookstores in the UK over a three-year period during my early teens, and supplemented them with another half-dozen novelizations in the US edition on our return.  But I'm not really a collector at heart; I'm a re-reader.  So I chose five to keep, gave the rest away, and felt a lot freer at the end of it.

Book hoarding is, for me, hanging on to books for the sake of owning them, with no realistic expectation of reading or referencing them in future.  I'll generally make an effort to keep books that were given as gifts, but otherwise, I'm trying to make room for books I love.

As usual, C. S. Lewis is good on re-reading:

"The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness. [...] It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact, that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the 'surprise' is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn't look as if it were suddenly goingto bring us out on the edge of the cliff. [...] The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the 'surprise' of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia."

-- Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, "On Stories" (1947)