So there they lay in the garage on the burn pile: my stack of gradebooks that have been in a box in the garage. I didn’t even browse through them. At some point, as you move forward, you also have to shed some of the past, and my gradebooks fall into that category as does most of the stuff in the black filing cabinet in the garage. I have three boxes of books: give to the library, give to the church, and take to the second hand paperbook store for exchange credit. Some of these are popular so maybe I’ll get some credit. It is time to begin to focus my library collection on my chosen field. I am even giving away my English textbooks from William and Mary which have made every move with me and collected dusk in the garage for the past year. It’s all on the web! If I get a hankering to read a Romantic poet (and frankly it hasn’t happened lately), I can do it. Byron, Keats, Shelley…they’re all at Project Gutenberg in an easy to store digital format that doesn’t take up any more room than my computer or the 200 gigabyte hard drive attached to it. No, it’s not a book with pages and words and notes from college but when have I looked back at that?
It might be interesting to reread those things like the guy who went back to Columbia did but do I want to spare the time? (His book is somewhere on the shelf in the garage. It was interesting but do I need to keep it? If I give it to the library there is at least a chance that someone else will read and enjoy it. Now, there’s a reason I never thought of…is that selfish of me?) Besides, I find some of it just not that palatable: I reread the Iliad and was horrified at its violence and views of women amidst lofty speeches and heroic feats. I prefer the Odyssey, I suppose, but it’s not much better. And I did enjoy reading Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (couldn’t put it down in fact) but I think I could give it up.
I did fire up Readerware and enter the hardbacks I am giving to the library. In a minute, I’m going to take the laptop and the bar code scanner out to the garage to enter those as well. That way I can keep track of donations. Finally, I have found a real reason to enter my books in the database and the technology is ready for me. Sometimes you come upon the technology first and then find a practical use.
