I wouldn't want to live in a bookless house and as Anthony Powell so memorably said, books do furnish a room. But as with so many things, less is more. Better curated collections in favorite categories than shelves stuffed with random paperbacks acquired from remainder tables. It can be hard to get over the compulsion to hang onto books as either something still to be read (even though the likelihood has dwindled to nil) or as tokens of achievement! But once you can no longer see the trees for the forest, there's little point. And that's aside from the issue of books as dustcatchers supreme.
I'm not nearly there yet, though.
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