Can you have too many books?

On the theme of having 'too many' of something...

Can you have too many books?

My choice to engage in private practice complicated my life plan to have dedicated spaces for work and play.  Work became a lifestyle, and the Internet just made the whole problem that much more complicated - accessing email and any other point of information at any time.  I am not sure why I didn't consider this back in 1981 when I first logged onto CompuServe.  I might have planned all this differently, and maybe made different life choices about information access.

Anyway, I think that I have too many work-oriented books.  Maybe.  Or maybe I just have too many in locations that I don't want to have them in.  I am working from one satellite office today and I looked at the books overflowing the bookshelf all over the floor.  How does this happen? 

I thought for a moment to just move them all down the street to my college office, but then I started looking at them and immediately recognized a problem.  Some of the work-oriented books are just good books that I wouldn't mind in this space but I have turned them into work-oriented books.  Jerome Bruner - Acts of Meaning - work book, or not?  Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: A brief history of humankind - work book, or not?

I can easily categorize the Willard and Spackman's occupational therapy text - but what in the world am I supposed to do with the book about Ella Lyman Cabot and her contributions to American pragmatist philosophy?  It was a good book - kind of related to OT - but not so directly.

I have some books that easily stay in the 'home' and 'non-work' category: my Flintstones and Marvel superheroes coffee table books, collected poems of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, my Lloyd Alexander books and other favorite children's literature.  I think the point of this is that I want more of that in my living space, and perhaps a little less of this other 'could be work' stuff.

The work-oriented books are just starting to bother me in some living spaces.  I don't know if it is a phase.  Maybe I will try to move some of them out and see how it feels.

Anyone else have this problem, and some solutions?

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