Creating Your Own Library at Home: How do you know when to let go of books, and when to keep?

Big or small, at-home-libraries grow and collect the books that we've read over the years. But when do you know when to clean out your books and really make it a library?

I thought of this post around the time that the Marie Kondo crazy started, especially when people were getting up in arms over her saying that you only need to keep around 30 books or so.

I call bullshit on that. Don't ever limit the number of books you have based on what another person said. If you like to keep your collection small, that's great. If you like a vast amount of books about different subjects, that's great too.

However, when do you know you need to slim down your collection of books? I, for one, love to have a multitude of books at my disposal. I also like to take out the books that I bought thinking I would love them, but never could actually get into them. This is where I take a little bit of the Marie Kondo advice of whether or not a book "sparks joy" in me.

I recently went through my library closet. Most of you don't know that about 7 months ago, I converted half of my closet to a mini-library for my books using custom bookshelves. I redid my room and because of the amount of space in my room, I had to find an innovative way to place all of my books. When I lived in my apartment, I had books in random cabinets throughout my apartment, but I longed to have bookshelves and create my own innovative library.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, during a spell of restless energy, I decided that I didn't like how my mini-library was organized and started going through it and organizing the books by series, size, and genre. The ones at the forefront were my YA Fantasy novels with the thicker novels on the bottom (ex: Harry Potter, Twilight, Outlander, and the Throne of Glass Series). On shelves that went deeper into the closet, I put the books (YA Fantasy and miscellaneous)that I have already read but still enjoy (Cassandra Clare's novels, A Court of Thrones and Roses series, history reference books, and texts books from college that I use as reference).

I, for one, love to have a multitude of books at my disposal. I also like to take out the books that I bought thinking I would love them, but never could actually get into them. This is where I take a little bit of the Marie Kondo advice of whether or not a book "sparks joy" in me.

As I was pulling out books, I placed the books that I knew I was never going to read, or I had a multitude of copies (during the Twilight craze, both my mother and I read it so I have double the amount of copies), on my bed to be transferred to a box and sold at Half-Priced Books. Some of these books, I truly had never read. Others, I attempted to read, but got about 20-30 pages in before I had to put it down and question why I bought it in the first place.

In retrospect, I was in a way, following Marie Kondo's ideology of finding the ones that "spark joy", or rather the ones that didn't. I knew going into my reorganizing the books that I was most definitely keeping, but I also had to look at the ones that I hadn't touched and ask myself, "Am I really going to read this later on?" If the answer was no, then it went into the selling pile.

So, what I'm trying to say is think of these few ideas when you are going through you books during a reorganization/building your library:

• Will you ever read it?

• Will you ever use it to help you with your writing or other projects?

• Does it have anything to do with your career path?

• Are you willing to give this book a shot again after you were disappointed the first time? *Does it spark joy?*

• Do you want to keep this book for your future children (applies to children's books)?