the library in the garage
14 Mar 2020 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWe've never made a catalog of our OWN books (we have done our tv and film media, both digital and physical, however), but we have to get rid of a lot of books that were MIL's that we won't want to read. She had a great deal of the genre that is sometimes called Modern Fiction and sometimes called Literature and whose summaries feature things like young women and people making friends with strangers and romances in foreign cities. And just looking at the backs of them over the last day, I was just sort of overcome with dizziness at the idea that this much non-genre fiction can be needed in the world and that people can keep voluntarily reading it.
One of my sisters in law also reads Modern Fiction, I think, but I would guess their taste in the genre is different because I haven't noticed many names in common. Also, she probably doesn't have that much time for novels with four teenagers in her house.
Anyway, I know we could just donate it all somewhere - to a friend or to the Red Cross thrift store; and we could just keep it all (which is unquestionably what my parents would do, and have done, many times, including accepting estate libraries that contained almost entirely duplicates of books they already had, which they then still kept until they could find individual people who wanted them); but we would rather offer them around to Swedish-speakers who might be interested in the same things, like MIL's friends and acquaintances, before we drive them all to the thrift store.
So, obviously, we have to catalog them! We instantly started a spreadsheet.
But it's not ALL Literature, which allowed my nose-wrinkling muscles to relax; there are also a great deal of what you might call Local Interest, some of it in coffee table books, and a chunk of Finnish history. Finnish history got very dramatic and bloody at times. There was something extremely amusing about seeing so many books about Fiskars in a row, though.
One of my sisters in law also reads Modern Fiction, I think, but I would guess their taste in the genre is different because I haven't noticed many names in common. Also, she probably doesn't have that much time for novels with four teenagers in her house.
Anyway, I know we could just donate it all somewhere - to a friend or to the Red Cross thrift store; and we could just keep it all (which is unquestionably what my parents would do, and have done, many times, including accepting estate libraries that contained almost entirely duplicates of books they already had, which they then still kept until they could find individual people who wanted them); but we would rather offer them around to Swedish-speakers who might be interested in the same things, like MIL's friends and acquaintances, before we drive them all to the thrift store.
So, obviously, we have to catalog them! We instantly started a spreadsheet.
But it's not ALL Literature, which allowed my nose-wrinkling muscles to relax; there are also a great deal of what you might call Local Interest, some of it in coffee table books, and a chunk of Finnish history. Finnish history got very dramatic and bloody at times. There was something extremely amusing about seeing so many books about Fiskars in a row, though.
