unmaking my library: a note on not book collecting

i hate owning too many books. i rent, so in some ways they're just things i'll have to move, and rn i don't reread. this doesn't mean i don't have lots of books in my flat - i do, i'm lent them, acquire them, and i get lots out of the library. but i try to be strong and decisive about getting rid of books once i've read them, and to only keep copied of ones which 1) are harder to find, 2) really impacted me.

i just finished space crone, which is a collection of le guin essays and writings, and a book which i will be holding onto. there was lots in there i want to use and return to, but i just wanted to share - or, really, note, or remember, for me - this passage, which i think is in some ways about the beauty and potential of leaving books behind, particularly in a period where they are consumables as much as artworks. this is from 'dangerous people', a speculative piece of fiction which develops out of always coming home:

she had [...] become not a maker but an unmaker of books, judging what should be saved and what unmade, the knot untied, the letters scattered like seed, the paper gone back to pulp or to earth and ash, to the green shoots and reeds and trees and books of years to come.