Musing Mondays: My Name is Bryan and I Suffer from C.S.S.

Today’s Musing Mondays is not from just one more page… as Rebecca is on holiday hiatus, so it comes from Mizb17 over at Should be Reading and is as follows: When you buy books, do they immediately go onto your bookshelf to wait until you’re ready to read them (even if that means months/years from then!), or do you read them right away? What makes you do this? If you’re a “shelver,” why do you think you don’t read books right away? Do you ever feel guilty for letting books sit there unread? If you’re a “read-‘em-now” person, why do you feel they have to read right away? Do you give away the books when you’re done too?

My name is Bryan and I suffer from C.S.S.: Chronic Shelver Syndrome. I am a chronic shelver, or at least I was when I had bookshelves (we sold them all when we moved from Utah to Washington State); now my books are stacked thirty to forty tall against two walls of the office/sewing room. However, when I do get books, they go through a journey: they will usually sit next to my laptop for a week or two before I get around to cataloging them on the list I keep, and then they’ll make it into the office and sit on one of the chairs or tables in there, and then I’ll get around to shelving them in their appropriate spot (alphabetical by author’s last name then by book title (unless they belong to a series, then they’re in series order)). I typically don’t read them off the bat because I usually already have a book on my plate (two or three if it’s the middle of a semester/quarter and I’m reading for classes) and so they are put on my Perpetual To Be Read List.

Do I feel guilty about shelving books? No. They will all get read at some point, and so I see no need to feel guilty about buying a book and not reading it immediately. I almost never usually give books away … though as I’ve mentioned recently on the blog (I think it was even a previous Musing Mondays (I’m too lazy to look it up right now)) I’ve given away books recently in an effort to “lighten the load” as we moved, but as well as being a sufferer of Chronic Shelving Syndrome, I am also a Book Hoarder.

When I do give them away it’s usually to a “good cause.” I typically drop them off at the local library, though this past summer I offered some of my former middle school students first dibs (and severely-reduced prices) on those books I was giving up, and I took a bunch of “classics” and history books I was going to cull from the herd to the teacher I worked with for her classroom.