Hah! Can't/won't read because paywall, but I can tell you what it feels like to utterly massacre about 250 linear feet of the residue of 42 years of a thorough

Hah! Can't/won't read because paywall, but I can tell you what it feels like to utterly massacre about 250 linear feet of the residue of 42 years of a thoroughly enjoyed and carefully curated book collection. We moved across the country and purposely downsized in anticipation of a quite light retirement a few years from now. The first couple of book boxes to the Goodwill were a quite pleasant experience. Finally, we are in the process of losing significant accrued but debilitating mass! The last half-dozen were an absolutely gut wrenching emotional desolation. A high proportion of our self-value in life were embedded in those pages, it turns out. Now however we're over it. As far as we can tell, in our social orbit essentially no-one reads in a methodical way. We were pretty focused on personal enjoyment, which we have always found in the more difficult authors. So, for instance, when three years ago I picked up the 38 yo copy of Ulysses that I bailed on so many years ago, I decided that older me thinks that's the best book I have ever read. My social group though. They apparently considered such an effort (yeah it sure was) to be stupid waste of time ("I would never do that."). Oh well[1]. I kept that one, yep. And my technical collection is down to a nostalgic retention of the two volumes of Hairer et al's "Solving Ordinary Differential Equations". And Knuth. It was very hard to part with Stevens, but I did. We also kept 15 feet of cooking/culinary references. Even with those, my McGee's "On Food..." only lives in my calibre library, but I dislike how awkward it is to look things up. So, on balance, it was the right thing to do, but it ended up being very, very hard. [1] I'm not a snob! I have happily read galaxies worth of schlock. If Cosma Shalizi can fess up to it then I will too. But I can barely remember any of them. Joyce, I remember a lot of his stuff, not just Ulysses.