The Great Library Purge of 2013

My home library has been in a state of, well, unusability for several months. I'll post pictures of this whole process at some point, but last weekend, I was finally able to spend some time making it friendly and library-ish again. As part of this process, I decided it was time to go through my bookshelves. Surely there are books I no longer need to own. I am a great spontaneous buyer of used books. If it looks slightly interesting and it costs less than $3, I'll probably end up taking it home. Those are the sorts of books, however, that accumulate dust on my shelves for years because that initial urge to own has never translated into a subsequent urge to read. And Sunday night, I was finally in the mood to cull these books from my shelves.

Or at least I thought I was. After an hour or so spent carefully examining each book on my shelves, weighing how likely it was I would ever read it, here is what ended up in the giveaway boxes:

Seventeen books. And nothing that was all that difficult to give up - a couple of old textbooks that somehow made it onto my shelf instead of a box in the basement, and several books I've read or tried to that I just didn't like. Nothing earth-shattering here. Seventeen books, leaving seventeen holes on my bookshelves to fill. That doesn't even begin to cover the 49 books I acquired from our public library book sale a couple of weeks ago, let alone the piles in the corner of the bedroom that have accumulated over the past several months. I have discovered that I am absolutely no good at giving books away - but extremely good at adding to my collection. This may be problematic someday. . .

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that there are a few more than 17 holes on my shelves. I also have two (small) boxes of books that I pulled off my shelves that I'm not completely ready to part with yet but may be on their way out. Hopefully, these books will end up in a Little Free Library in my front yard someday. Or they may somehow find their way back onto my bookshelves if I decide that I really just can't bear to see them go. What is it about books, even ones we've never read, that make them so hard to let go of?

Does anyone else have trouble getting rid of books or giving them away?