Bibliophilia

            Please don’t misunderstand me – I love my family. I am devoted to my friends in the States. I am going to have an actual meltdown when I say goodbye to my beloved bulldog/border collie mix Simon.

            Furthermore, I don’t see myself as excessively materialistic. I like my comforts, but I’m pretty chill about the whole notion of possessions. People before things, you know?

            However, there is one arena in which the “people before things” philosophy falls away, and that is books. I love books. I hoard books. Every place I’ve ever lived has had shelves full of books, with more books crammed into, under and around every flat surface. I was the nerdy kid in elementary school who always got busted for reading under her desk, and now I’m the nerdy chick who chooses handbags based on how many books I estimate I can cram into it. I’m moving to the UK to study publishing because by god, it is high time this obsession made me some money.

            Of course, when you’re moving across the Atlantic, you really have to pare down your possessions. The questions I’ve been wrestling with these past few months haven’t been “how will I stay in touch with my mother?” or “will I be able to make it back to the States for my best friend’s wedding?” but “what books am I taking with me?” and “holy cats, how am I going to part with the rest of them?”

            After three purges, I’ve sold off eight boxes of books to my used bookstore, and I still have a whole bookcase that’s crammed to the gills. It’s amazing how many books you can acquire in a quarter of a century. I’m getting down to the books that it’s going to be hard for me to part with – I remain incredibly attached to a lot of the things that started my love affair with books, so I have a whole stash of young-adult feminist fantasy novels in the vein of Tamora Pierce and Patricia C. Wrede. At the risk of sounding like a capital-L Loser (too late!), those books were hugely important to me in my formative years, and surrendering them is going to be like losing friends.

            I still haven’t decided what I’m taking with me. How do you decide what’s important enough to carry on your back across an ocean?