Weeding

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Do you ever weed out unwanted books from your library? And if so, what do you do with them?


Anyone who's ever seen the state of my room would assume that I never get rid of a book, ever, but actually I do have a system (although it's a system that means I do keep most of my books...)

I'll always hang on to a book if I enjoyed it enough to consider recommending it to a friend or to take pleasure from seeing it on my shelves, and I'll also hang on to it if it's older than 70 years or so, or rare and out of print. Oh, or if it's part of a series that I have yet to finish reading.

So that basically leaves one-off novels I didn't enjoy very much that were printed after about 1960 - or duplicates, if I've somehow ended up with two copies and one or more of them is newish. I have two copies of a couple of 1800s poetry collections but they're both so beautiful that I really can't bring myself to let them out into the wild.

In the area I live in, leaving something on the wall outside your house means that it's free for anyone walking past to take - it's great, sometimes you'll find a t-shirt or a chair and get to just take it home on the spur of the moment. On may way home from work today I actually found a bedside table that just needs a clean out of the drawer and it'll be perfectly fine. Once I've finished reading a book, if I decide I don't want to keep it I'll put it on the wall outside, and wait for someone else to take it (and pray it doesn't rain, I feel terrible leaving even bad books in the rain!)