For the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I cleaned my apartment from top to bottom (pretty much).  I dreaded doing the bookcase because that would mean parting with books. Books!

Now I buy mostly e-books, but I’d accumulated quite a few paperbacks over the years and I knew some had to go.  It gave new meaning to Keeper Shelf.  Here’s the bookcase:

I should point out that’s the “after.”  It’s the best I could do after purging, holding on to each book as I weighed its emotional value.  I kept some mediocre books (like some of Stephanie Laurens’s lesser Cynsters), which got shoved in the hard-to-reach back tier.  And I put the ones I reach for again and again in front, like Mary Balogh’s Slightly series, as well as Candace Camp’s Willowmere.

The rest were put in a sack that I’ll take to my mom’s.

Eventually.

For now, I like thinking they’re still in my apartment, within reach.  Because I have a sentimental attachment to books that got me through some very sad times.  And that’s how it should be.

I should also point out that those are battery-operated LED candles.  Because if there’s one person who’s capable of catching her bookshelf on fire with candles, it’s me.