Sorting Books

We are moving this summer:  moving our summer house from Virginia to California.  We want to be closer to my parents, who live in southern California, and closer to my wife’s family, in Japan.  We also want to be OUT of the oppressive heat of northern Virginia:  we had no power for four days this week and it was not pleasant.

Our main residence will remain Exeter, New Hampshire, but we will spend summers and breaks in California rather than here in northern Virginia.  It is not easy, leaving the DC area where I have had a “foot” for much of my life, and I suspect that I will never really leave; that I will be here often as a visitor and perhaps some day as a resident again.

In the process I am weeding out books:  books I read in high school, in college, in graduate school, in my early days as a lawyer.  Hundreds of books, ranging from dry legal texts to popular novels.  In some cases these are books that I know I will want to re-read, but not in the form in which I now own them.  In the 1980s, for example, I read a great deal of nineteenth century English literature:  Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, etc.  I intend to re-read these books, but my current paperbacks are rather sad, and one can nowadays read these people for free in electronic format.

We have had considerable success selling furniture on Craig’s List, but our advertisement there for books has gone unanswered.  Well not quite:  one gentleman arrived early on the morning after the power went out, to purchase two bookcases, but wound up purchasing as well about eighty books, mainly older volumes.  (I have, and am NOT selling, many books that belonged to my grandparents and in some cases great-grandparents)  But otherwise the advertisement for books has been met with silence.  Is this a worrisome indicator that Americans do not read?  Or just that Americans who purchase items from Craigslist do not NEED books in the way that they need another children’s bed?