It seems 35 is my limit

I went through 35 books yesterday. A-E. (I alphabetized them first.) I got to F, Lynn Flewelling, The Oracle's Queen, read the first chapter and was tempted to send it away. But I remembered I loved The Bone Doll's Twin. It was just so long ago I read it. Maybe I'll love this one if I re-collect the first two and read them again.

Yes, they've disappeared too, I'm really going to have to make notes when I lend books out -- to that end, I've been cataloging them in Goodreads as I go along. I have a plan. I'll create bookshelves, lent to Mel, or lent to Jane, etc., etc. I know, I know, or use LibraryThing that supposedly has that built in, but then I'd have to input them all again and figure out a new system (and pay them up front because I have well over than 200 books.)

I worry a little that I was too harsh on the last bunch before I reached Flewelling, but they didn't catch me, and that was the rule -- and if I let myself double guess my every book, none of them will ever go away and they really need to. Books are no good just sitting on a shelf, they need to be read. (So if anyone is reading through my Goodread ratings -- all those single stars are the ones I've decided to send away, and the stars are my hint to myself to try not to collect them again -- a reminder that I have seen them and looked into them. They do not mean those books are bad, just that in the big book culling of 2010, they did not catch my interest strongly enough quickly enough.)

Oddly enough, the ever-practical (usually-practical?) Husband was determined that we should keep these six.

• Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, published by the American Book Company in 1911.
• Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920
• Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926
• Dictionary of Quotations, (missing title pages, but the preface is dated 1883, and the stamped leather is still really cool even if it is a bit torn.)
• Gypsies of Spain (parts I and II) by George Borrow, John Murrey, Albemarle Street, 1846

They weren't in the fiction I sorted through today, but his determination they needed to be kept for no better reason than the very advanced age of the text was a little surprising.

I kept 17 out of 35 so far. A little better than half. Better than most agent/query request rates, but they should be since there was something about these books that caught my attention to make me bring them home in the first place. At my usual price of a quarter each, it could have been anything: the author's name, the title, the cover, or even the person at the garage sale being so nice I needed to buy something. (I can't help myself sometimes).

But this is the go-away stack so far:

Yes, I am all over the haphazard stacking. Yes, it drives Husband crazy too. Anyone local who wants to come collect some books free before they're driven off for the Friends of the Library sale, do let me know.

But with all this, my books actually fit on my bookshelves again.

You know, until next year when the obsessive collecting refills them all.

Until then... Temporary hoorays! And at least three more days for the first pass through the fiction. Do you think it's possible I'll have a day when I've read all my books? Right now I'm pretending there's a possibility of that.