Books You Can Live Without

It’s that time of the year when a fresh start means reducing the clutter accumulated in the last 12 months and in the many months and years before. The sagging bookshelf and the piles of books under the tables and around the bed might be a good place to start.

How do we decide what to cull and what to keep? We asked some authors and the owner of the Strand book store for advice.

• Francine Prose, author of “Anne Frank” and “Reading Like a Writer”
• Billy Collins, former poet laureate and author of “Ballistics”
• David Matthews, memoirist, “Ace of Spades”
• Joshua Ferris, novelist, “Then We Came to an End”
• Jane Smiley, author and novelist, “Private Life” (spring 2010)
• Chang-rae Lee, novelist, “The Surrendered” (March 2010)
• Fred Bass, Strand Book Store

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Make a List

Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of “Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife.” Her “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them” ends with a list of 118 books she could never give away.

Two years ago, I re-organized my library, and gave away 20 cartons of books, culled according to the following general principles:

• Unless you are an Egyptologist, you only need one, at most two, enormous coffee table books on the Art of the Pharaohs.
• If a country, like Czechoslovakia, no longer exists, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to take the travel guide along with you when you go.
• If the reproductions in an art book are so fuzzy and blurred that you can’t tell the work of the Impressionists from that of the Pointillists, or even from the Surrealists, get rid of it.
• Ask yourself the following hard question and answer honestly: If I live to be 100, will I read this book again?

Of all the books I gave away, the only loss I regret (or have even noticed) is the “Book of Knowledge,” published in the 1920s, which I got as a gift from my great aunt. It was charming and strange, but its 25 volumes took up an entire shelf, and I had to lose it for the same reason I gave away all those other books: to make room for more books.

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An End to Vanity

Billy Collins, a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY), served as poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. His latest collection of poetry is “Ballistics.”

I recently entered what might be called a literary version of the horse latitudes, which required me to throw overboard a lot of books for the sake of staying mobile.

For anyone attached to the book as an object of beauty or to one’s own library as a physical testimony to the depth and breadth of one’s literary experience, such shedding requires a certain ruthlessness.

But once I decided to simplify the process by keeping only books I was sure to open again, I was amazed at how many books suddenly fell on the dispensable side of that dichotomy. No matter how fond I am of you, “The Duke of Deception,” I’m not going to read you again. It’s been really great, “Get Shorty,” but into the cardboard box you go.

And so it went, leaving me with what resembles a reference department at the local library. Of course, I made lots of exceptions, reprieving such books as “Miss Lonelyhearts,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” and other vade mecums. But in the end, it was a relief to narrow the shelves down to the basics, the Zen essentials you might say. Yes, I’m talking about you, “Anatomy of Melancholy,” “Seventeenth-Century English Poetry” and “Lolita.”

Frankly, I am well into the second phase of life when one begins to enjoy getting rid of all the stuff one enjoyed accumulating in phase one. And who needs such elaborate announcements of one’s literary credentials?

After all, is a gentleman’s library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity? Now if I can just get rid of all the mirrors in the house.

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My Literary DNA

David Matthews is the author of “Ace of Spades,” a memoir, and “Brother Superior,” a forthcoming biography.

A lot of this stuff can go. If I’m being honest, some of it is on my shelf because I like the idea of it being on my shelf.

Things I will never, ever read:

The biography of Willem de Kooning. Ditto the 600 pages devoted to Wittgenstein’s life and thought. Malraux’s “The Voices of Silence” will remain mute, its spine un-cracked, the book’s presence meant to imply to anyone perusing my “library” that I’m a man of serious ideas and scholarship.

Sadly, I’m too far along to absorb whatever Bertrand Russell’s history of philosophy has to teach me, so out it goes. For that matter, what with the urgency of global warming and recession and deadly flus, I might as well live in the moment, so anything with the words, “The History of…” in the title is, well, history.

And I can safely remainder to charity the Camille Paglia screeds which seemed so edgy in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I mistook her combo of misogyny and classicism for refreshing “political incorrectness.”

On to fiction. Delillo’s “Underworld” can go, because a book can be long, or it can be boring, but it shouldn’t be both. Marquez’s “A Hundred Years of Solitude” makes the scrap heap, because it would take precisely that combination of circumstances before I could be bothered to finish it. Bye, bye Jamaica Kincaid — assigned 20 years ago by a comparative lit professor — you will always be homework to me. Soon, my bookshelf is lean. All muscle and bone.

All that remains is my literary DNA: Hubert Selby Jr., Fred Exley, Joan Didion, Richard Price, Dostoyevsky, James Baldwin.

Those other books by those other authors were great and good. But these authors can stay because they did something the others did not: they saved me.

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Home Is Where Your Books Are

Joshua Ferris is the author of two novels, “Then We Came to the End” and “The Unnamed,” which will be published in January.

Get rid of books? Are you kidding? The only reason anyone should get rid of a book is if they’re going for that Japanese minimalist design look in which the room is all white and not even the drawers are visible. For those of us with more modest decor goals, living everyday lives with clutter and old clothes, cats and children, sour towels hanging from the rack, knickknacks, pilled throws, boring old mementos, what could be more essential than books?

The great works of fiction, the art books with full-color plates, the wispy illustration books full of peewee nostalgia — I’d never willingly part with one of them. Insignificant books, untouched books, even those books I consider physical nuisances — same. I have books on the bookshelves, books in the basement, books under the bed, books piled high on top of my wife.

Sometimes when I hear of a book I want, I buy it and then I put it away with every reassurance that it will be read soon, forget about it, hear about it again, buy it again, and only realize my mistake when I place it next to its twin on the bookshelf. It’s an addiction of good intentions.

Books are notes from the field, bound and domesticated, life brought into narrow focus. Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home.

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Two Special Bookcases

Jane Smiley is the author, most recently, of “The Georges and the Jewels,” a horse book for young adults. Her new novel, “Private Life,” will be published in the spring.

My house is long and narrow, and looks as though a river of books has run through it and washed various volumes at random into the bookcases that run along the walls.

Two of these are special for me — a cabinet of books I’ve read and loved, at the far end, and three shelves beside my bed of books that attract me but that I haven’t read so far. If I had to discard all the others, I would still have enough between these two for several long blizzards or a severe economic downturn.

Because after I finished the ones I haven’t read (“His Excellency” by Emile Zola, “They Were Counted” by Miklos Banffy, “The Duke’s Children” by Anthony Trollope, etc.), I would start over on the ones I have (“Middlemarch” by George Eliot; “Love in a Cold Climate” by Nancy Mitford, along with her translation of “The Princess of Cleves” by Madame de Lafayette; “The War of the End of the World” by Mario Vargas Llosa; “The Good Soldier” by Ford Madox Ford, etc.). All novels, most European.

Out go the picture books, the cookbooks and the volumes for research. Even the horse books and the dog books and the books of funny essays. The ultimate savable book, for me, is too long to remember, but too compelling to forget, one that repays rereading with repeated surprises. “Njal’s Saga,” “The Heptameron,” “The Complete Henry Bech.” Read more…

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What I Want to Throw Away

Chang-rae Lee is the author of four novels, including “The Surrendered,” which will be published in March. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

Although periodically I have fits of discarding all sorts of sentimental flotsam like old note cards and photographs and perfectly decent dress socks, I can’t bring myself to get rid of even a book I dislike, perhaps because I read “Fahrenheit 451” at an impressionable age. Still, there are too many books in our house, a good number of them not chosen but sent or given to me, and so here’s some I’d cull:

• How-to books, especially those on writing and self-improvement.
• Any novel or poetry collection written by a celebrity.
• All of the Advance Reader Copy copies I’ve accrued over the years.
• Cookbooks with a spiral binder; these are usually distributed by P.T.A., Rotary clubs and voter groups, perfectly wonderful organizations that are perhaps too willing to include really anybody’s recipe for pasta carbonara; also, cookbooks featuring the words easy, delicious or light in their titles.
• Books originating from or inspired by a blog, because I’m hopelessly sentimental about the dying world of book-only books.
• Anthologies of fiction and poetry that have “greatest” in the title; “best” is O.K., but “greatest” usually means a hit list of the too familiar and bland.
• Books with a swastika on the cover, as they’re often not half as sensational and frightening as I hope them to be.
• Any oddly prefixed “____-onomics” titled book.
• Any book handed or sent to me by someone who refers to himself as an “author.”
• Finally, the extra copies of my own books, especially the foreign editions. It’s the most pathetic kind of vanity to keep five copies of one of my novels in Finnish, Catalan and Greek, especially when I’ve probably sold no more than that number in those countries. I’m going to throw them all away.

But I know I won’t.

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Give Your Books to Me

Fred Bass is the co-owner of the Strand Book Store in New York.

As an 81-year-old bookseller at one of the largest used bookstores in America, I am frequently asked about which books should be discarded from a personal library. In New York, where real estate is at a premium, space for personal libraries is limited so I encourage my customers to assess their collections periodically and weed out books.

My advice is to first clean out duplicates and books with repetitive information — why do you need six dictionaries? Next, remove all books with out-of-date information, like atlases and reference books. Political, economic and topical books should be the next category to sort through; you don’t really need that copy of Richard Simmons’ “Never-Say-Diet Book” (a 1981 best-seller), or a book on the future of the Democratic or Republican parties, written 20 years ago.

One should eliminate books that are in poor condition unless they hold sentimental value and remove those you never intend to read again.

Once you have weeded out the duplicates, the out-of-date material and those moldy, unreadable tomes, make sure to note any first editions or autographed books, as they could be valuable if they are in good condition. Put them aside and store them properly — away from direct sunlight and humidity. You might consider investing in some Mylar, as that is the only proven way to keep a valuable book in perfect condition.

When you’re all finished, think of selling your books to the Strand! Though we’ll definitely buy the quality books you plan on discarding, we really want the books you’re keeping.