Both Our Girl in Chicago and Belle Lettre have posts up about purging their shelves and jettisoning some unneeded books. OGIC is on a quest to dump 300-odd books from her shelf in a quest for self-improvement that I find fundamentally frightening, but also very understandable. My promiscuous book-acquiring habits, and pathological writing habits, mirror her own:

When you're a graduate student—especially if you're me—you buy books very nearly indiscriminately from new and used bookstores. You pick up free books from the box outside Powell's or a box left outside a faculty office. You go to the annual library sale and go a little nuts. You must have books. Wanting to read a book is not a necessary condition for buying it; merely anticipating wanting to read it at some undesignated time in the future will do.

For one thing, having the right books gives you a sense of belonging and being in the know. More substantially, there's almost nothing you can't imagine possibly, somehow, at some point, helping you with your research, if you only have it at hand at the right time. (Actually, this outlook explains a lot about why my dissertation was doomed. There's never not something else you can and should read, there's always important stuff you don't know.) Buying books added hope and subtracted anxiety. I hadn't read a certain Raymond Williams book? That was bad. But merely buying the book, I discovered, made me feel halfway better. When my unfamiliarity with the material became a real roadblock, there it would be, readable on the spot. This, folks, is the way to amass a truly unmanageable and largely unread library.

I have more posts on PrawfsBlawg-- one on error-correction and the Roberts Court, one on the insanity defense and same-sex marriage.