Purging Books

Hello My Imaginary Friends,

I LOVE books. The smell, the feel, the reading… If you’ve been to our house (Books End) you know we have an impressive library. You might be surprised to hear that every couple of years we go through it and purge our books.

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As I get older and less wise, I’ve come to know my tastes a little better and there are books that I have no interest in reading. Books that I thought I would love but now just make me go, “do I have to?”. I can make four categories that I have no interest in reading anymore.

Classics

I’m not talking the old classics. I have a special place in my heart for Beowulf, The Three Musketeers, and other classical literature. (Although I have an illogical hate of epistolary style books.)

No I’m talking about the classics of genre that people will be shocked you haven’t read. Things that are classics because we grew up with them not because they are the greatest. Not that I judge anyone for loving these, but I’m not interested in another 7-13 book epic fantasy about a farmboy.

Power Triangles

These are often in romance, adventure, horror, or urban fantasy. There’s a main character and two others that are trying to control them. This can be villains, lovers, or sometimes both. It’s filled with cringe and drives me up the wall.

That means it takes a lot for me to read a vampire book and I shudder at the description of most werewolf books. Again they aren’t bad books, I just don’t have the mental energy.

Violent Horror

I like horror, and I like Stephen King, but there are some that I just can’t handle. Overly violent and crude horror makes my stomach turn and makes me want to stop reading. These can be fantastic literature that challenge your way of thinking but I don’t want to read it. I’ll probably never re-read A Clockwork Orange.

Pretentious Writing

Every once in a while someone tries to elevate a genre and writes about a vampire, or modern wizard, but with prose that’s so pretentious is passes purple and hits ultraviolet. If the first page is so long winded that I zone out… It’s not for me.

There can be beauty in this, but it has to be done in service to the writing not the authors ego.


So these books and those that I never plan on rereading are the ones we’re getting rid of. There’s only a couple dozen, which is nothing compared to the couple thousand we still have.

So what are you sick of reading?

Éric