# Cull your book collection down to a dozen volumes **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 22, 2009, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596 "2009-06-22T16:01:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/1 "2009-06-22T16:01:04Z")
For whatever reason, you must reduce the total numbers of books you own to twelve. If you own Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King in separate volumes, then keeping them leaves only nine open spots, even though they’re really just one book. Contrariwise, if you have all the Sherlock Holmes novels & stories in a single codex, you still have 11 spots left after choosing that one. Also, you may not run out & buy a Kindle & download tons of books that way, nor may you buy a single-volume copy of LOTR+Hobbit+Silmarillion if you don’t already have it. I’ll start: [ol] [li]Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings[/li][li]Tolkien’s The Silmarillion[/li][li]Lewis’s Till We Have Faces[/li][li]Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr[/li][li]Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To[/li][li]Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying[/li][li]Pat Conroy’s Beach Music[/li][li]The aforementioned compleat Sherlock Holmes[/li][li]Adams’ first four Hitchhiker’s novels (sadly I do not own the five-volume version)[/li][li]Heinlein’s Expanded Universe[/li][li]The Concise Oxford Dictionary[/li][li]Bulfinch’s Mythology[/li][/ol] I hesitated about the last. I like Hamilton’s Mythology better for the writing, but Bulfinch gives us more stories. Anybody else? ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/2 "2009-06-22T16:15:57Z")
Whoa, I’m going to wait until this evening to answer this one, to give me time to think! I do know that To Kill a Mockingbird and The Oxford Study Edition of The Bible(NSRV, with Apocrypha) will be included. ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/3 "2009-06-22T16:25:14Z")
Over my dead body. ---
**Author:** ![Crotalus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crotalus/32/41_2.png) [@Crotalus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crotalus)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/4 "2009-06-22T17:06:09Z")
Based on which ones I either reread or read in repeatedly: 1. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2. Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (both of these would be my Oxford Press editions) 3. Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire 4. Dashiell Hammett’s Complete Novels (50 cent yard-sale acquisition) 5. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird 6. Shakespeare’s Plays (hard to read due to small print and thin paper, but they’re all in there) 7. William Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay 8. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway 9. C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters 10. David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System 11. The John McPhee Reader 12. The Bible (NIV with an inscription by the man who gave it to me) ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/5 "2009-06-22T17:07:18Z")
> [@DrFidelius](#): > > Over my dead body. Seconded! **Skald the Rhymer:** Your books or your life! **Le Ministre de l’au-delà:** _(Strapped to the table saw, the whirring blade rapidly approaching his testicles)_ Take my life, you heartless bastard - I’m saving my books for my old age! ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/6 "2009-06-22T17:13:07Z")
> [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](#): > > Seconded! > > **Skald the Rhymer:** Your books or your life! > > **Le Ministre de l’au-delà:** _(Strapped to the table saw, the whirring blade rapidly approaching his testicles)_ Take my life, you heartless bastard - I’m saving my books for my old age! I didn’t say the other books were going to be destroyed. Feel free to assume they’re going into storage for, oh, a year. ETA: Besides, even when I was doing the Evil Overlord bit, I’d never have done the “your books or your life” thing. I’d have sent the flying monkeys to steal the books, confiscate the ones I liked, and force you to watch while the flung poo on the rest. But you’ve have gotten them back later. ---
**Author:** ![Jettboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/85e7bf/32.png) [@Jettboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jettboy)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/7 "2009-06-22T17:27:28Z")
_The Collected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury_ _Blood Sport: A Journey Up the Hassayampa_ by Robert F. Jones _Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife_ by Mick Farren _Child of Fortune_ by Norman Spinrad _1984_ by George Orwell _Boys Life_ by Robert McCammon _Don’t Stop the Carnival_ by Herman Wouk _Jesus’ Son_ by Denis Johnson _Last Call_ by Tim Powers _The Art of Thomas Hart Benton_ by Henry Adams _The Pugilist at Rest_ by Thom Jones _River Teeth_ by David James Duncan ---
**Author:** ![Emily\_Litella](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/emily_litella/32/3370_2.png) [@Emily\_Litella](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Emily_Litella)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/8 "2009-06-22T17:29:58Z")
I’m thinking of any books I’ve always enjoyed re-reading. I would definitly have to have the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plus Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series, and Marion Zimmer Bradford’s Mists of Avalon. (I can watch Harry Potter as movies still, right?) ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/9 "2009-06-22T17:33:59Z")
> [@Emily\_Litella](#): > > I’m thinking of any books I’ve always enjoyed re-reading. I would definitly have to have the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plus Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series, and Marion Zimmer Bradford’s Mists of Avalon. (I can watch Harry Potter as movies still, right?) I don’t see why not. Hell, I didn’t even say you couldn’t go to the library; just that you, yourself, would be only allowed to only twelve codexes. ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/10 "2009-06-22T17:40:43Z")
> [@](#): > > Skald the Rhymer said - I didn’t say the other books were going to be destroyed. Feel free to assume they’re going into storage for, oh, a year. You might not be aware, because I try to keep my grousing about it down to every third post, but as of mid-October of last year, my bloody collection IS in storage, along with my scores, CDs, Vinyl recordings, backup copies of purchased software… I started packing up with the stuff I didn’t think I’d need right away in June of 2008. I’ve lost track of the number of things that I’ve bought a second copy of because I couldn’t find the box with the one I already own in it, but the list starts with The Magic Flute, which I bought for a production I did in Hamilton in October, packed sometime just before we moved out of the old house, and needed for another production in London, ON in late May. Couldn’t find it… I now have two copies of La Traviata, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the Grade 9 RCM piano repertoire book, Langenscheidt’s English-German dictionary, the list goes on. [hijack] If one more person tells me that ‘If you’ve done without it for a year, you don’t really need it’, I will ensure that person is done without for a year… [/hijack] Anyway, enough rant, here I go in the spirit of the OP - Herodotus - The Histories J. M. Roberts - The Penquin History of the World The Mahabharata - mine’s in three volumes. trans. B. van Buitenen Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass e e cummings - Collected Poems Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion Homer - The Iliad Homer - The Odyssey Tolstoy - War and Peace - mine’s in two volumes, so that’s me out. ---
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/11 "2009-06-22T18:08:57Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > For whatever reason, you must reduce the total numbers of books you own to twelve. > Anybody else? Over. My. Dead. Body. 😉 Seriously though, I think I’d try to pick twelve I hadn’t read yet. Not sure how I’d go about it, but I’d rather go with something new. . . ETA: I really have to start reading the threads before responding to the OP. ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/12 "2009-06-22T18:12:04Z")
**The Bible** **The Early Upanishads** - Patric Olivelle’s ed. + transl. **The Rg Veda** - McDonnell’s ed. (it’s the one I have) **The Mahābhārata** - Van Buitenen’s ed. + transl. (3 volumes and incomplete - but I love 'em) **The Illiad** **The Odyssey** **The Histories** - Herodotus **The Collected Works of William Shakespeare** **Critique of Pure Reason** - Kant **Walden** - Thoreau On preview: Nice list, **Ministre** - half of it anyway 😉 ---
**Author:** ![NinjaChick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/71c47a/32.png) [@NinjaChick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NinjaChick)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/13 "2009-06-22T19:20:45Z")
_twitch_ This is like asking a parent which one of their children they would put in storage for a year. But, kinda sorta in order: 1. Complete works of Shakespeare. 2. Complete works of Plato. 3. Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe. 4. The Iliad 5. The Odyssey 6. The Bible (KJV) 7. The Complete Stories - Franz Kafka 8. Basic Writings of Nietzsche 9. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (has all the books in it) 10. London: The Biography - Peter Ackroyd 11. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 12. Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales (I was going to put Herodotus, but then I realized I really wouldn’t feel right having Herodotus and not Thucydides, and since I don’t personally own either of the absolutely _fantastic_ Landmark Thucydides or Landmark Herodotus, I’d rather have my Homer [Lattimore]). ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/14 "2009-06-22T19:56:19Z")
> [@Panurge](#): > > **The Bible** > **The Early Upanishads** - Patric Olivelle’s ed. + transl. > **The Rg Veda** - McDonnell’s ed. (it’s the one I have) > **The Mahābhārata** - Van Buitenen’s ed. + transl. (3 volumes and incomplete - but I love 'em) > **The Illiad** > **The Odyssey** > **The Histories** - Herodotus > **The Collected Works of William Shakespeare** > **Critique of Pure Reason** - Kant > **Walden** - Thoreau > > On preview: Nice list, **Ministre** - half of it anyway 😉 Good Lord - are you me, or am I you? ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/15 "2009-06-22T20:06:45Z")
> [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](#): > > Good Lord - are you me, or am I you? :: slaps Le Minstre etc with trout :: Quiet, ere you send the mods on a sock hunt! ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/16 "2009-06-22T20:33:19Z")
Please don’t slap my (apparently) long lost twin. No socks here, though admittedly a bit of trolling goes with my username. (I didn’t include **Gargantua & Pantagruel** as my copy is in 6 volumes - rather a waste of precious space). ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/17 "2009-06-22T21:28:51Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > :: slaps Le Minstre etc with trout :: > > Quiet, ere you send the mods on a sock hunt! ::smacks lips:: Mmm, trout! ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Some\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ad7895/32.png) [@Just\_Some\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Some_Guy)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/18 "2009-06-22T22:25:31Z")
Talk about an impossibly difficult choice. I think I’d just go to zero and get new books that I haven’t read and then keep cycling them out like that. ---
**Author:** ![tr0psn4j](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@tr0psn4j](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tr0psn4j)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/19 "2009-06-22T23:04:38Z")
[ol] [li]Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway[/li][li]The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway[/li][li]Lord of the Rings - Tolkein[/li][li]The Hobbit - Tolkien[/li][li]Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass - Carroll[/li][li]Hamlet - Shakespeare[/li][li]Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut[/li][/ol] At this point I’d go out and buy a few books. I do own over 12 books but I wouldn’t want to waste the rest of the spots on those particular books. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596/20 "2009-06-22T23:18:55Z")
I own something like 3000+ books. You want me to cut it down to TWELVE? IMPOSSIBLE! Though definitely on my list would be the family heirloom copy of The Builders, 1856 edition. Not a long read, but absolutely lush printing. My only regret is that my mother had to die before it passed into my possession (and NO! I had _nothing to do_ with her passing! Would still much rather have mom, since she let me look at it whenever I wanted anyway) I actually AM trying to whittle down my collection, but I’m only planning to pare it down by half. At which point I’ll probably start collecting more books again. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cull-your-book-collection-down-to-a-dozen-volumes/500596.md?page=2)