Peg Kerr's Journal

I noticed that my backup drive was continually failing to back up. After monkeying around with it for awhile, I took the drive and laptop into Best Buy, where they diagnosed the problem: I had waaaaaaaaay too many files on my computer.

Oh.

So I started culling files and music off the computer. It was both unnerving and satisfying, but I managed to kill several gigabytes worth of data, which meant I got the automatic backups going again.

Inspired by this, I attacked several other sources of clutter. I emptied several more boxes of legal files left in the garage by Rob (no, I'm still not done going through them). I took a box of hardback mysteries to Half-Price Books (only got $5.00 for them, but at least thirty more books are out of the house). I culled through my closet and took some bags of clothes to a thrift store (I took particular grim satisfaction in stuffing a sweater Kij had given me into the garbage bag. Why had I kept it so long? I have no idea).

I still have much too much stuff. But this week, at least, I beat it back. At least a little.

The design shows some of the things I cleared out this week. I overlaid those images with a scythe, both to indicate cutting things out of my life and as a veiled reference to the concept of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Lower center: A half-open laptop. Directly above: hanging files. Above that: stacks of books. Above that, stacks of clothes on shelves. Overlaid over all: a scythe.

Decluttering



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

It has taken several weeks, but the huge brick-and-board bookcase that was in my bedroom, crammed with a large part of Rob's science fiction/fantasy book collection, is gone. I asked several family members if they wanted the books but got rid of only a handful of the books that way. Then, I checked with a coworker who is an SF/fantasy fan and he happily removed a couple of hundred books for the collection. As I had mentioned earlier, I took some and distributed them in local Little Free Libraries.

Finally, I decided that the most efficient method was to take the books, a box at a time, to Don Blyly at the Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction bookstore. Don would look through each box and generally took somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 of them. He would offer a sum, either in credit or half that value in cash. I took cash, because I am not trying to encourage myself to buy more books. It generally would come out to somewhere between $5 - $15 a box. I could hear Rob screaming in protest in my mind with every box, but I did it, and I am glad it is done.

I will probably take several more boxes of books piled up in corners. There are still many many books left in the house. But I am next turning my attention to doing over the bedroom. For one thing, getting rid of the books has revealed how disgusting the 30+ year carpet is. Ugh. I want to rip it out.

It has been hard, emotional work. It is odd--these were books I had not generally read myself. Why was it so difficult to get rid of them? I think it was because Rob was so passionately tied to his collection, it was as if a part of his essence had seeped into it, and it felt as though getting rid of them was getting rid of him.

I have worked through it, however, and the bulk of the books are gone. I did pull some off the shelf that I had read and loved myself. But I will go through them and see if I can get them out of the library, and if I can, I will take those too, in a future trip.

Image description: Three views of a brick-and-board bookcase in the process of being dismantled. Top: a semi-transparent view of the books from floor to ceiling. Center: a view with the books with one board left in place. Bottom: a view of the baseboard with the marks of the supporting bricks left on the carpet. All the bricks and boards are gone. Hovering over the semi-transparent bookcase is the signage for Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore/Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore.

Dismantling



Click on the links to see the 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I had a hard time thinking of what this week's collage should be about because, on the surface, nothing much happened. I went to even fewer places than I usually do: I didn't go to Gigi's Cafe on Thursday night. I didn't go to church for Lenten supper on Wednesday or to services on Sunday. I exercised very little.

Frankly, all I wanted to do was to lie on the couch and read. No, 'wanted' is an insufficient term to describe the feeling. It was an overwhelming urge.

I checked my Goodreads stats: as of today, I've read 83 books, 25,000 pages, since January 1.

I mean, I read a lot. I know that. But...that seems like A LOT.

This is the fourth year that I've been doing this collage project, and as I was trying to come up with the subject of the week, out of curiosity, I went back and checked previous years. Interestingly, I seemed to be in a very similar state of mind at this point of the year for the past two years. Torporish. Insular. Inward-looking. Perhaps slightly depressed, and channeling all my attention to reading.

It's helpful to know that I have emerged from it in the past. Doubtless, I will emerge from it again.

It wasn't until I finished the card that I realized that this was another nautically-themed collage. For the fourth week, when talking about grief, I wrote about Shipwreck.

This card is about the doldrums, the term that sailors use for a portion of the sea around the equator where ships can get stuck for weeks at a time. The sea currents and the winds stop, and ships simply drift in the becalmed waters. Sailors have to bear the boredom (and sometimes a slowly growing unease, due to the fear that they might be stuck there so long their water and food supplies will run out).

What I learned doing this collage: I was dissatisfied with my first attempt, because the color of the three elements I used in it (the sea, the book, and the woman) didn't look as if they went together. One was blue, one was yellowish, and one was brown-tinted. I tinkered with the color balance of the book and the women, but I couldn't quite figure out the process of adjusting color through the photo editor on my computer.

But then it occurred to me to identify the colors of the sea image with an online hex picker tool and then use another online tool to adjust the color tints in the other two images to match. I'm pleased with the results.

Image description: Background: a blurred surface of the sea. Foreground: over it floats an open book. In the center of the book, over the spine, a figure of a woman sleeps in clouds, as if emerging from the book. Lower center over the book is another woman, in the same blue tints as the sea, again, lying on her side with her eyes closed, dreaming, cushioned by clouds.

Doldrums



Click here to see the 2024 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

So here are my totals for the year. I think it's rather impressive, if I do say so myself:



I think only three of these were audiobooks that I checked out of the library when I was recovering from my concussion in February—I ordinarily don’t do audiobooks at all. A number of these were novellas, so the number of works I’ve read looks high. Still, that’s a lot of pages. And it doesn’t even include the unpublished fanfiction I read this year or the unpublished manuscripts I was reading to review for other writers.

I read fast and I read a LOT. The three weeks in February that the concussion prevented me from reading were agony.

Edited to add: oh, interesting; I didn’t quite understand how unusual this, but I ran across this: The size of the American reading public varies depending on one’s definition of reading. In 2017, about 53 percent of American adults (roughly 125 million people) read at least one book not for school or for work in the previous 12 months, according to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Five years earlier, the NEA ran a more detailed survey, and found that 23 percent of American adults were “light” readers (finishing one to five titles per year), 10 percent were “moderate” (six to 11 titles), 13 percent were “frequent” (12 to 49 titles), and a dedicated 5 percent were “avid” (50 books and up).

I guess I can consider myself as "super avid."

One of the most difficult issues I've had to deal with in culling things down after Rob's death is What On Earth Do I Do With The Books?

Soooooo many books.

Like, thousands upon thousands of them. Rob LOVED to collect books and to get them autographed. I have already cleared at least a thousand books out of the house, and I still have nine floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the living room and dining room absolutely crammed with books. I have thinned out the stacks that were piled up on the floor because there wasn't enough bookcase room. There were still yet more boxes in the basement and garage.

Rob's attitude was that once a book came into the house, it could never leave again. PARTICULARLY if he had it autographed. And he had hundreds of autographed books--perhaps thousands. He loved going to conventions and meeting the authors and chatting them up, and he was so proud to get their books autographed. It was like a dopamine hit for him. And he especially loved to tell the authors he met, "My wife is an author, too; you should read her books!"

I mean, I got it, to a large extent. We met in a writing class, for heaven's sake, and yes, we bonded over books. I LOVE reading books. I went on to write novels, and I got a master's degree in English.

But still: sooooooo many books.

They were piled everywhere. In the corners of the living room and dining room and bedroom, with yet more boxes stuffed with books stacked against the wall. He would go to author signings at Dreamhaven and Uncle Hugo's and Once Upon a Crime. When I'd mildly protest about the money spent, he'd say "But honey! I got a first edition, AND I got it autographed! It's gonna be valuable someday!" He'd check out the remainder shelves at Barnes & Noble, and he'd go to the Friends of the Library Booksale and buy yet more books. "If you go at the end of the day they'll give you a whole grocery bag for just a dollar! And look--this one's a first edition! How could I pass it by?"

I actually started to worry about the structural integrity of the house due to the weight of all the books and bookcases. I couldn't get at stuff in the basement, I couldn't access my possessions in the living spaces, because of all the books in the way. Yes, I love books, honey. I adore them, yes, I do. But So. Many. Books. Including many I would never read.

I read aloud to him while he was getting chemotherapy, as he was dying.

And then he was gone.

It is hard. SO hard. It almost feels like I hear a scream of betrayal from Rob in the back of my mind whenever I try to get rid of a book. That's one of the reasons I created the memorial Little Free Library--it was one way to honor him and yet get rid of books.

But I couldn't possibly move enough books out of his collection through the library. It would take years. Decades. Centuries.

Eric and I have been thinking about the future. I am not sure what I'll do about the house, but he's made it clear he doesn't want to move in here, and I certainly understand that. Living in the house feels like living in a museum to the happiness of a family's life--but that family is now gone. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say it's a family that has changed and moved on.

I have been trying to cull and downsize my possessions, and so I've been trying to figure out what to do with all the books.

The girls won't take many. Fiona has decided to limit the number of bookcases she will put into her new house (undoubtedly taking notes from her parents' example), and Delia doesn't have space to put any. Uncle Hugo's is gone, and Dreamhaven certainly isn't going to take more than a few--Greg Ketter, Dreamhaven's owner, has told me that the generation that collected books is dying and/or downsizing their collections, and the secondary markets that catered to buying and selling used books for them are contracting and disappearing, too. Booktrader is gone, and Cheapo will only look at fifty books at a time and offers barely anything. The pandemic has reduced options even more: Hennepin County Library and the Minnesota Women's Book Project have stopped taking donations.

But I've found out that the Ramsey County Library is still taking books in three locations. Fine; Rob certainly was a supporter of the Friends of the Library projects; heaven knows he BOUGHT enough books from them. The only drawback is you're limited in dropping off no more than two boxes or bags at a time.

So I've been doing that. In the last week, I've made the forty-minute round trip three times, dropping off two boxes each time, each time grimly trying to turn a deaf ear to the protests of the agitated, ghostly Rob in my mind. I told my Friday coffee group that it would be easier if I were the sort of person who just read a book once and then never cracked the cover again. I have re-read some of these books, my mind traitorously whispers; shouldn't I keep them?

But no. For the ones I might want to re-read someday, sure, that's a risk, but if I haven't opened them in a decade, better to lighten the load and my life. I can always borrow them from the library or put them on my digital reader if I want to read them again. And there are some I've never read at all and I think I never will. A well-loved book is a map to the mind's thoughts at a moment in time. But I can still take those thoughts with me into the future, and release the book for someone else to read and enjoy.

Rob, I'm so sorry. I know you treasured these books. I have, too, but that doesn't mean that I have to keep them forever. I will always love you, but you are gone now, and I'm trying to create a new life for myself and space for a new future--with fewer things.


Books




Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

This article (Beyond Bodice Rippers: How Romance Novels Came to Embrace Feminism) led me to this very interesting blog: Romance Novels for Feminists

jimhines (Livejournal link here) Jim Hines mimicks the poses of the women on his fantasy book covers and discovers that striking a pose is not all it's cracked up to be. (Specifically, that the poses made his body, er, crack.)

I deeply, deeply adore him for doing this.

I get the Writer's Almanac email from Minnesota Public Radio every day. Yesterday's included these two paragraphs about Louise Erdrich, and my immediate reaction was yes oh yes indeed yes:

She said, "We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."

She said, "By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

starting Game of Thrones. I am a total neophyte to the series.

Good idea/bad idea? (Alas, I do not get HBO and so cannot feast my eyes on Sean Bean.) But I saw some initial promotional material which certainly intrigues me. Especially given a cursory check with Googlefu, which notes the influence of the history of the War of the Roses on the series.