So I'm not sure what precisely happened, but in a moment last night, I went from a person who wouldn't think of parting with a book that I had read to someone who wanted nothing more than a drastic purging of any and every book that didn't justify its inch of shelf space. The picture is of all the books that are outta here. Here's a list of titles on their way out the door; some I've blogged on and some I haven't:
Can You Trust a Tomato in January?
Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do about It
Why Does Popcorn Pop?
Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture
Secret Formula
Fat of the Land
Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food
How to Read a French Fry and Other Stories of Intriguing Kitchen Science
The Tummy Trilogy: American Fried, Alice, Let's Eat, and Third Helpings
Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market
Pot on the Fire: Further Exploits of a Renegade Cook
The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: America's Culinary Revolution
The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What It all Means about Who We are
Beard on Food
365 Good Reasons to Be a Vegetarian
Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash
Consuming Culture: Why You Eat What You Eat
Much Depends on Dinner
We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat
The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food
The Greatest Generation
True Women
Kennedy
'Tis
Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America
Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia
A History of Reading
The Book on the Bookshelf
A Place for Us: Eleni's Children in America
Cane River
Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood
Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
Rethinking Schools: An Agenda for Change
Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence
Punished by Rewards
The Trouble with Perfect
New Mother's Guide to Breastfeeding
Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present
Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, The Religious Right, and the Struggle for Our Schools
Childwise
The Shelter of Each Other
Saving Childhood: Protecting our Children from the National Assault on Innocence
Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--and What We Can Do about It
The Closing of the American Mind
Marriage and Family in a Changing Society
There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America
Child Development
The Vocation of a Teacher
The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980
Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America
The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families
Learning Activities for the Young Preschool Child
The Path Between the Seas
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
A Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua
The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonement of Children in Western Europe
Prodigal Summer
Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey with the Poor
The African Experience
Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today
A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist
Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes
Living Out Loud
A Not Entirely Beniegn Procedure: Four Years As a Medical Student
Good Wives: Image and Reality iin the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750
Wide Awake at 3:00am: By Choice or By Chance?
The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology
A Map of the World
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
365 TV-Free Activities You Can Do With Your Child
365 Outdoor Activities You Can Do With Your Child
The Twentieth Century: The History of the World: 1901 to 2000
A Civil Action
A Woman in Residence: A Doctor's Personal and Professional Battle Against An Insensitive Medical System
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage
September
The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Memoirs of a Geisha
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
Purity of the Heart Is to Will One Thing
How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
The Pilot's Wife
Manufacturing Victims
Villages
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character
Human Natures: Genes; Cultures, and the Human Prospect
In Love with Norma Loquendi
The Girl from Botany Bay
Christmas Portraits
The Bible Code
When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purplse
An Introduction to Language
Low Fat Cooking
Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul
Reality Isn't What It Used to Be
A Distant Mirror
Grammatical Man
Keeping Faith
The Millionare Next Door
The Professor and the Madman
The Girl with the Pearl Earring
Hidden History: Exploring Our Secret Past
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
The Heath Anthology of American Literature
The Seven Storey Mountain
The View from a Monestary
The Inquisition: Hammer of Heresy
Why God Became Man and The Virgin Conception and Original Sin
The Birth of Christianity: Reality and Myth
The Cloister Walk
Christology in Dialogue
The Gospel of Mark
A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity
The Way of Jesus Christ
Jesus, the Crucified People
Catch-22
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes
Les Miserables
King Lear
Plagues and People
The Color Purple
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe
A Woman's Journey to God
The Bad Popes
Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship
Why Christianity Must Change or Die
Dictionary of Saints
Christology at the Crossroads
Meditations on the Apocalype
The Letter to the Hebrews
Crossing the Threshhold of Hope
Everyday Life in Ancient Times
The Holocaust
A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community
Jewish Memories
Tradition in A Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism
The Folk of the Fringe
Gandhi: An Autobiography
Medieval Women's Visionary Literature
Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives
In Whose Image? God and Gender
A Time to Weep, A Time to Sing: Faith Journies of Women Scholars of Religion
The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture
Sisters: Lives of Devotion and Defiance
The Feminine Face of God: The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation
It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It
All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
World Religions from Ancient History to the Present
Sandcastles: The Arabs In Search of the Modern World
Hadj: An American's Pilgrimage to Mecca
The Multiple Identities of the Middle East
Maybe (Maybe Not)
From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives
The Second Stage
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century
Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women
A History of Their Own: Women In Europe
Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America
Generations: A Century of Women Speak about Their Lives
Home-Alone America: The Hidden Tole of Day Care, Behavorial Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes
The Women's Room
Women and Men in Society
Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women's Studies
Women of Ideas (and What Men Have Done to Them)
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America
Women's Roots
The Women's History of the World
Lifting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science
Women of the Four Winds: The Adventures of Four of America's First Women Explorers
The Underside of History Volume I
The Underside of History Volume II
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism
The Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex
Sex, Art, and American Culture
The Psychology of Women
Women at Work
Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society
Women of the Forest
Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in late 20C America
Misdiagnosis: Woman As A Disease
The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk about It
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother
American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie
Food and Whine: Confessions of an End of the Millennium Mom
Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World
Mothers Talking: Sharing the Secret
Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness--and Liberalism--the the Women of America
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men
Ever Since Adam and Eve
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
What's a Smart Woman Like You Doing at Home?
Mother Journeys: Feminist Write about Mothering
Ever Since Eve: Personal Reflections on Childbirth
The American Way of Birth
Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed
The Motherhood Report: How Women Feel about Being Mothers
The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued
Good Enough Mother: Changing Expectations for Ourselves
Margaret Sanger and the American Birth Control Movement
Sam Walton: Made in America
The Girl from Purple Mountain: Love, Honor, War, and One Family's Journey from China to America
Waiting: True Confessions of a Waitress
Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson
Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace
21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com
Not by the Sword: How the Love of a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman
M.D.: One Doctor's Adventures Among the Famour and Infamous from the Jungles of Panama to a Park Avenue Practice
Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation
Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places (Ann Richards)
A Reporter's Life (Walter Cronkite)
Not Without My Daughter: A True Story
Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia
Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom
My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story
A Bomb in the Brain: A Heroic Tale of Science, Surgery, and Survival
Trial by Fire: A Woman Correspondent's Journey to the Frontline
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana
The Dark Side of Camelot
Washington: The Indispensible Man
Mornings on Horseback
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League
Seven from Heaven: The Miracle of the McCaughy Septuplets
Galileo's Daugher: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
Abraham Lincoln
The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey
Great Harry
Her Little Majesty: The Life of Queen Victoria
Lilibet: An Intimate Portrait of Elizabeth II
Storytelling with the Flannel Board
Ronald Reagan: An American Life
House of Sand and Fog
A Walk in the Woods
The Birth of Venus
The Known World
The Emperor of Scent
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
What Einstein Told His Cook Volume II
Plain Speaking: A Candid and Revealing Portrait of the 33rd President in His Own Voice
Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles
Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do about It
From Sundails to Atomic Clocks
One Hundred Days: My Unexpected Journey from Doctor to Patient
Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It
The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior
A Natural History of the Senses
In a House of Dreams and Glass: Becoming a Psychiatrist
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer: What Is the Question?
The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World
Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature
The Medicine of ER or How We Almost Die
The Physics of Star Trek
The Secret Life of Germs: Observations and Lessons from a Microbe Hunter
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
First, Do No Harm: The Dramatic Story of Real Doctors and Patients Making Impossible Choices at a Big-City Hospital
Why We Get Sick: The New Theory of Darwinian Medicine
The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy and the Development of Western Thought
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
The Stone Age Present: How Evolution Shapes Modern Life
Paradigms Lost: Images of Man in the Mirror of Science
Exploding the Gene Myth
Leprosy: Diagnosis and Management
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
Doctors: The Biography of Medicine
Nobel Prize Women in Science
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe
Myths, Models, and Paradigms
The Birth of a New Physics
Medicine at the Crossroads
The Selfish Gene
The Construction of Modern Science
The Cosmic Blueprint
The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy
The Medical Detectives
Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Culture
Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic
Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plague
The Brethren
The Lazarus Child
The Nanny Diaries
The Bonesetter's Daughter
Drowning Ruth
The Voyage of the Narwhal
The Corrections
The Stone Diaries
Bridget Jones' Diary
The Curious Incidnet of the Dog in the Nighttime
Angle of Repose
Back When We Were Grownups
A Perfect Arrangement
The Cobra Event
Paper Trail
Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream
Little Altars Everywhere
Midwives
Holidays in Hell
Parliament of Whores
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
Give War a Chance
Slaves in the Family
Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam
The Lost Tribe: A Harrowing Passage Into New Guinea's Heart of Darkness
Family Man
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
Never Done: A History of American Housework
Out of Silence: A Journey into Language
The Search for the Perfect Language
Middletown, America: One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope
The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community
Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers
The Myth of the Welfare Queen
Why We Buy: The Science of Shupping
Feasting the Heart: 52 Commentaries for the Air
Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World
A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values
Fearless: Real Truth about Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism
The 9/11 Commission Report
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana
The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship
Calendar: Humanity's Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year
Walden
The Great Gatsby
Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row
The Grapes of Wrath
East of Eden
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Roots
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
The Physics of Star Trek
The Ships of Earth
Cultural Anthropology
The Changling
Survived to Tell: An Autobiography
15 comments:
Wow. Wow!
You zapped King Lear? Wow, what an ungrateful daughter you are! :P (I hope it's because you have a Riverside and don't need the single book.) And Les Miz, and Catch 22, and a bunch about food and women and . . . wow. Wow.
I'm in awe. Horrified awe. And I'd better not let Mardell see this post. She regularly tells me to do the same. (Mean, nasty hobbitsses, won't take my precious away from me!)
East of Eden?!! : )
I've been selling my cast-offs on Amazon.com. I just got $49 for one small out-of-print paperback called You Can Write a Cookbook.
Two of my kids are already arguing about who gets the books when I'm gone.
I'm not totally against drastic purging, but I have fewer regrets when I sleep on it...
Kaimi and marc bohn--
The classics that we ditched were nasty, yellowed paperbacks that didn't do justice to the text. We figure we'll buy new copies of those when the kids are in high school.
deborah--
It wasn't about spring cleaning. I have no idea what it was about.
c jones--
I thought about that or ebay but it just seems like soooo much work--addressing, packing, trips to PO, when most of them have a very low value and I can just take them in tto Half Price Books.
Julie,
There are a number of intermediate retailers who will sell items on ebay for you, for a chunk of the profit.
Here's a link to one national chain: http://www.i-soldit.com/index.asp . There's one in a shopping center down the street from me in SD; I'm sure there are similar operations in Austin.
Of course, it may still not be worth it to go ebay. But if hassle etc. is your reason not to, that _can_ be avoided if your books are worth any amount of money.
Hmm -- and are they all already gone? Now (belatedly) I'm wondering which ones I should ask you to send me. :P
(Yes, Mardell would be absolutely thrilled if I acquired more books. But some of those titles sound really pretty cool).
I did this a couple of years ago. It was interesting to see what survived.
Basically, if I was pretty much guaranteed to be able to find it at the library, it went -- so no more classics for me.
If it wasn't worth reading again at all, it went.
What I'm left with are more obscure works by authors I like, cool reference books, and the kinds of books you buy for English classes.
I don't even own a copy of LOTR anymore.
It wasn't my original plan to do this, but I've had a lot of people ask, so:
I'll sell any book for 3.50, including shipping. But you have to contact me before noon on Monday, because I'm convinced those piles are going to fall on the kids soon.
$3.50 a pop, for getting Julie Smith as a sort of personal book shopper? Talk about money well spent!
$3.50 for shipping? I have a list you can send right off to Kyrgyzstan. :)
You know what's funny? I found this post through the WTM boards.
BTW, my board has a new name:
http://www.ahomeforhomeschoolers.com. 610 members and counting.
btw, how do I send you money?
I'd like to buy:
How to Read a French Fry and Other Stories of Intriguing Kitchen Science
and maybe a few others.
Thanks!
Stephen or anyone else,
Send me an email at juliemariesmithatyahoodotcom telling me which titles you want.
Congrats! My attitudes toward keeping books has changed since moving around 4 countries in 8 years!
I did the same thing a couple of months ago in the lead up to my move into new digs. I think I purged about 100 titles from my collection (and my collection is nothing compared to yours.)
I'm impressed by your gumption!
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