It’s time for Musing Mondays, a meme from A Daily Rhythm!
Musing Mondays is a weekly meme that asks you to choose one of the following prompts to answer and then supplies a random question:
- I’m currently reading…
- Up next I think I’ll read…
- I bought the following book(s) in the past week…
- I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…
- I’m really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…
- I can’t wait to get a copy of…
- I wish I could read ___, but…
- I blogged about ____ this past week…
LAST WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: What do you do with your books once you’ve read them?
Why last week’s? You ask? Easy. Because I want to answer it. Only this week! (also, I wanted to pre-write this post when I had the time and I didn’t know if A Daily Rhythm had a list of future questions somewhere – I couldn’t find one.)
It all depends on the book of course.
If it’s a kindle book and I don’t think I’ll ever read it again I will delete it. It’s a lot harder for me to do this if I paid for it in the first place. But I hate having a great long list of kindle books in my kindle app. I’m sure I could organise them into folders, but I’d like for it to be possible to completely remove them from my device. Why is that a problem? Alternatively I’ll keep it if I liked it. On the rare occasions I loved the crap out of it, I will buy it as a hardback, (sometimes a paperback). I’ve done this three times. One of those, I bought it in paperback because there were no hardbacks in the UK, then I later got them as hardbacks and I still own all the others…
If it’s an actual book and I don’t think I’ll ever read it again I’ll get rid of it. I’ll offer it to a friend if they’d like to read it or I think they’ll like it, otherwise it goes in a box and goes off to a randomly chosen charity shop. Unread books I don’t think I want to read anymore also end up in this box. Only 4 times have I disliked a book so much I didn’t even do that. Three of them became crafting books and have had their pages removed and turned into pretty things. The last is somewhere around and wont be having that done to it because of the content. I have no idea what to do with that book. I might even have to attempt to sell it online to get rid of it.
There’s also now a book windowsill at work, so if I think it’s a book that might be more widely liked I’ll take it there and let someone else choose it from the collection. So far I’ve not found one for myself there.
If I love a paperback, I may upgrade it to a hardback and give the paperback away. Otherwise they are put on my shelves to live happily together in some form of possible organisation that I think I understand. There’s actually a revolt going on at the moment and everything non book related is being evicted from my shelves and a more comprehensive grouping structure is being implemented. Every now and then I have a cull and books will be removed and given to people or charities. The ones I wont get rid of are giveaways or ARCs or personalised signed ones. Even if I’m not sure I liked them, they are still important to me, and they’re all stacked on their sides, often double rowed to get as many on my cases as possible. Except for my favourites shelf, but that’s a whole other story.
What do you do with YOUR books once you’ve read them?
