An Introduction

            There is an internal struggle dueling within me. On one side is the desire to collect and amass all I want. I own over 400 books, which part of me wants to display and enlarge into a colossal personal library.

I just want to surround myself with books like Henry Bemis in “Time Enough at Last.”

The rest of me aspires to live simply and reduce my material possessions as much as I can. Simple living is also practical. Only by lining the walls of my apartment (that I just moved into with my fiancé Olivia!) with bookshelves would I be able to fit all my books. And the less I own, the easier it will be to just quick pack a duffel of my essential belongings in the event of a zombie attack.¹

As far as slimming down my library goes, I own shelves-worth of books that I’ve never read. I decided on this approach: read every unread book I own, decide if I like it or will ever read it again, and then either hold onto it or drop it. Whether it’s a literary classic like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or more obscure like Ken White’s Bookstore Planning & Design, I’ll judge each book on its own merit, ignoring any kind of canonical value. At the end of this reading project, hopefully I will have realized I have a lot of books that I don’t want and be able to minimize my library – reduce the quantity to increase the overall quality.

Quality over quanity: Know how much these stamps are worth? Watch Charade.

1. Ever since reading Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, my plan for handling a potential zombie apocalypse is to jump into a boat (with Olivia, family, and a small group of willing friends, of course), head north by Lake Michigan – less zombie traffic than on land. I head up through Lake Superior into Canada. Then I will just find an isolated frozen area to make home. For the most part, the only zombies I’ll have to deal with will be frozen.