Today I decided to play amateur librarian and organize my books downstairs. There were about a hundred or so on this shelf and I broke them into fiction, classics, and philosophy...then for no particular reason I separated the classics and philosophy sections into nationalities. English, American, Russian, German, Greek/Roman. Some of them I had to actually peruse the author bio to figure out where they went. George Orwell, for one, turned out to be English. And Rabelais turned out to be a a fourteenth century French monk. I actually think I knew that from freshman history, but I forgot. Unfortunately, the one thing I couldn't do, try as I might, was get rid of some of them. I have no more physical space for books. The books in my room barely count, since those are ones from younger years for the most part, sci-fi fantasy and the lot. One down stairs bookshelf is now full of my books, the other one has my mom's plus some random ones, my dad's take up the one in the den plus all the spaces under desks, and my sister's bookcase is overstuffed. There's nowhere for me to put them anymore. (Actually I realized this like a week ago, and guess what I did the next day? Visited this thrift store bookshop with Heather and bought eight more books, of course.) My mom suggested I "pare down" the ones I have. But for some reason I have a maniacal obsession with keeping every one of them. Some of them I have to keep because I haven't had time to read them yet. Some are ones that I keep meaning to force myself to read, like Emerson and Hemingway and *shudder* Marx and Engels. There are a few I started and gave up on because the foreign names got annoying, like Anna Karenina and Dostoyevksy's Crime and Punishment. I don't think either one had a happy ending anyway. The large majority, of course, are books that I read and liked and keep around in case I want to read them again. But there are books, like everyone damned one of the Tom Clancys, that I have read, and loved, but I know I will never ever pick up again. They are way too long, way too complicated, and once you know all the twists and turns there's no point. But still they sit, nine of them, taking up more than a foot of valuable book real estate, and I don't have the heart to make them leave. It's like a collector's impulse. The only one I don't have is The Bear and The Dragon, which of course I've read, but I know if I see it somewhere I'll buy it, just so it can join its siblings on the shelf. It's crazy.