Growing up in my family, the love of reading was just as much a given as converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. My father is a journalist and both of my sisters are currently writers. Even though one of my sisters and I both have dyslexia, the we still caught the reading bug. We just caught it at 7 instead of 2 like my oldest sister. My parents' house is full of books, with one room's walls entirely covered by built-in bookcases. To my knowledge, no one really reads any of these books anymore (with the possible exception of my mom, who still looks up things in our 1994 edition encyclopedias because she thinks "to google" is an R-rated verb) but I think we all like knowing that they're there.

The tendency to collect and hold on to books is in my blood, and my room at my parents' house is just as full of literature as any other room, if not more so. I have one free standing bookcase that is overly-full of books, a row two and three deep along one wall, and 3 more full shelves in the walk in closet. As part of my move in September, I have started trying to cut down on my possessions. Clothes were fairly easy- anything that didn't fit or I hadn't worn in a year was gone. I only need one pair of jeans. I only need one black shirt. I can let go of the clothes. Books were not so easy. I decided to go through them this past weekend while I was home alone (with the dogs) while my parents were at the beach. I poured myself some red wine, turned on some Shostakovitch, which felt appropriate, and dug in.

Books aren't like clothes. You can't ever outgrow certain "children's" books, and even if I haven't read _The Secrert Garden_ in a year (or 8) you'll have a tough time getting me to let go of it. My sister was telling me that when she went through her books to cut them down to the essentials, she only kept ones that she would purchase again if she were to loose everything in a fire. I've thought about it a lot, and I think if I were to loose all my books in a fire, I would only replace a few of them. I would buy a new Bible (hopefully the same edition as mine so I could still know where everything is). I would buy _The Irresistible Revolution_ by Shane Claiborne, and I would buy _The Old Man and the Sea_. I would hope someone would give me the complete set of classic Winnie the Pooh books, but I wouldn't buy it myself.

Lucky for me, my books were not all lost in a fire. Rather, I vowed that i would keep only what i could fit on my one bookcase (which is well over 6 feet tall) and nothing more. I ended up breaking them into categories, and then arranging the categories into (what I felt was) a logical order. At the top is poetry and classics, heavy on the poetry. The classics I kept were largely from Hemingway, Dickens, and Steinbeck. The next shelf houses the most influential books from my classes at college, from the politics of human rights to environmental political theory to liberation theology. These flowed easily into all the other liberation theology I have purchased, which flowed nicely into more or less "applied" versions of these books, like _Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger_ and _Practical Justice_. These transition into (and this only makes sense if you're me, which I am) travel books, including a Swahili- English dictionary I stole from the Reston public library. Actually, the travel section could just as easily be the Africa section, except for one book on the politics of Central America that I read during my breaks in the back room one summer at the zoo. From there we go to the memoirs of several people who worked with international humanitarian groups and true-life accounts of child soldiers, which leads into what I called in my head "regular good books". In this section I grouped authors together, which means one shelf is almost entirely taken up by Toni Morison and Chaim Potok. These section is also home to several children's or young adult books. S. E. Hinton makes an impressive showing. From these we have "funny good books", where Dave Barry, Christopher Moore, and Nick Hornby all make impressive contributions, numbers wise. The bottom shelf is books about horses and books about art. Art could have fit in well with my books from college, but to be honest, several of them were just too tall for that shelf. A few things I managed to save from selling by giving them to my nephew (who better enjoy those Beatrix Potter books I adored so much as a child) and the rest- five giant bags full- are heading to the used book store.

I think the books I'm giving away are almost as interesting as what I'm keeping. For example, those bags contain three copies of _Emma_ and two of _Oliver Twist_, neither of which I have ever read. There are several books on Hindu mythology, and at least 5 on the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. What can I say, I had some interesting phases in junior high.

I love every single book left on that book case. I will probably pack only the essentials to Baltimore (the "fire re-purchase" books, plus a few others but I like knowing the rest of them are there, waiting for me. In all likelihood I will only end up selling the rest at the end of this year, hopefully in preparation for some exotic several-year trip in a developing tropical country, but I'm not ready just yet. In this strange time between adolescence and adulthood, between the sheltered suburbs and inner city Baltimore, college and a "job", I don't yet know how to define myself, and I'm happy to let my bookcase do that. Poetry, politics, theology, travel, and young adulthood mixed in- I'm all there. I know I will continue to cut titles, and even entire sections (because let's be honest, the horse section can't last much longer) but for now, it's where and who I am.