Mission accomplished

So it was a long day and night, but the main shelves are back in commission.  Now this is only one of many things that I needed to do or hope to do, but it was a big thing nonetheless.  (I also helped my daughter struggle through her homework, which was also important.)  As I was getting close to giving up, I opened up one of the boxes (near but fortunately not underneath the printer), and it held the missing Shapiros, DeLillo's White Noise and a couple of other poetry books (by far the most important being the LOA edition of Wallace Stevens, and I am a bit ashamed to say I hadn't really noticed its absence).

This is basically how things look now (a controlled chaos):

A few close-ups:

I think I'd need 4 or so additional full bookcases to get all or nearly all the books out of boxes, but this is a good core that I can work through -- and presumably bequeath.  I have found that trying to reduce my books to a core collection is a useful through frustrating exercise.  I've really refocused on getting a lot of fiction out, including most of the Victorian novels that have been boxed up for probably close to 10 years (they have taken over most of the space given over to philosophy and anthropology*). 

I went from 10 or even 11 shelves of urban books down to 3(!), and I had to cheat a fair bit by stacking a few sideways or even behind the main books.  But this is a solid core that I will try to read or at least skim, and is probably the first time I have really made any attempt to decide what is and is not essential (especially given that I am not going to be an urban studies professor -- that ship has sailed).  Nonetheless, as I was making these selections, I realized I am not quite ready to just dump out all the other urban books (particularly case studies of L.A., San Francisco, St. Louis, Detroit and so on).  In terms of what I left out on the shelves, it generally was restricted to case studies of Toronto, Chicago and New York.

The huge number of books stacked in the read then discard pile is really disheartening, and I have taken a few and added them to the proper TBR pile, so that some progress can be made.  I really need a month where I do nothing but read.  I am going to have to be pretty heartless though and not keep these books around after I read them.

So I now need to start working through the boxes with random papers in them and seeing what can be thrown out and what scanned.  I am hoping to come across a couple of notebooks: one has most of a science fiction story written out in longhand and another one has a bunch of the Maclean's notes.  (I recently came across the one with the original notes for the overall plot of the novel -- it is from 1995, which is unbelievably sad that I have just done nothing with this but somewhat amazing that I have it in my hands at all.  I think the only thing to be said is that the novel I write as a 40 year old will be more accomplished than whatever I would have written in my mid 20s -- at least one would hope so.)

Anyway, once I track down the last of the Maclean's notes and xeroxes, I will feel it is worth setting up an official time to write each day (maybe 10:30-11:30 or something).  I suspect that means the blog posts will drop off, at least for a while.  But maybe that is ok.  The actual nature of communication on the internet is starting to feel extremely sterile to me (and that is when it even rises above the really ugly tribalism that seems to have seeped into most aspects of on-line culture in the U.S and sadly in Canada as well).  So I will probably want to devote more of my time to getting published in more traditional venues at least for a while.

* While I really don't want to make another pass through the books, I am a little sorry that Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures is tucked away somewhere.  Well, I guess the reward for clearing out a bunch of the TBRD pile over the next 2-3 years is that I can dig through the boxes for the books that are calling to me, and many of the others that are more "inert" can be let go...