this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Books (lemmy.ml)
submitted 12 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 minutes ago* (last edited 4 minutes ago)

My apartment is 60% books. I don’t have enough bookshelves, I have most loaded to the point where they are bending and there are piles of books stacked on top. Stacks and stacks and stacks.

I think my library is almost an art project at this point. I thrift a lot, check out library discard sales and have a bunch of things I bought when you could get books on Amazon for a penny + shipping. I often pick up 5-10 a week, because at the thrift shop that’s maybe $10 at most. (Goodwill is getting precious, but the really ratty ones are often prime spots.)

Very little fiction. Mostly textbooks and history and language and arcane computer things and strange religious literature and philosophy and paranormal arcana. Obscure things - I mostly collect things that I wouldn’t normally be able to find in a library.

My ex hated my books and wanted to work out a deal where I’d have to give up two for every one I took in. Now I am free to live in a pile of stacks. I don’t care if it looks “messy” or “cluttered.” It represents my mind.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 minutes ago

If you should keep one thing in life it's books.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the "new ones", and asked if she could help.

I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.

I don't know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

There's having 30 books, and 10.000 books. There's probably a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. No one needs 10.000 books.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 minutes ago

Some people read a hundred books in their lifetime and keep 30. The 10k books on those shelves only represent a small part of what I have read in my lifetime.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

No one need 10.000 books

Not with that attitude.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (3 children)

If your whole schtick is about decluttering, you should be able to differentiate between "less" and "fewer." Getting things down to a countable number achieves "fewer"-ness.

Also, looking at walls of books sparks joy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

If your whole schtick is about decluttering, you should be able to differentiate between “less” and “fewer.” Getting things down to a countable number achieves “fewer”-ness.

Bullshit dogmatic rule by pedants who make up rules & pass them down like schmucks instead of observing & studying the actual, standard language. True: fewer is only for countables. However, less is fine. It has been used with countables for about as long as written English has existed as documented by linguists & English usage references:

quoted passage

The primary point is that the now-standard pedantry about less/fewer is in fact one of the many false "rules" that have recently precipitated out of the over-saturated solution of linguistic ignorance where most usage advice is brewed.

But not the usage advice at MWCDEU. This is the start of its entry on less/fewer:

Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault—it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.

As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on less:

This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but strictly proper. —Baker 1770

Baker's remarks about fewer express clearly and modestly—"I should think," "appears to me"—his own taste and preference. [...]

How Baker's opinion came to be an inviolable rule, we do not know. But we do know that many people believe it is such. Simon 1980, for instance, calls the "less than 50,000 words" he found in a book about Joseph Conrad a "whopping" error.

The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great—he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin—more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker's lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated.

Less is more general than fewer, and the references identify common constructions where less is preferred with countables.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Sorry, less word more good

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Less word more fewer!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

Less book more feuer!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

+1

Less junk, fewer things. Less anxiety, fewer panic attacks.

... And I already reached semantic satiation with "fewer."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

Less shit, fewer sewers.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

You'll have to pry my Pratchett collection from my cold, dead hands.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I have never read all of his books because at some point I will have read his last book.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

Sadly the quality was dipping for the last few. I didn't finish Unseen Academicals.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Anyone else have a redneck family that started dropping off endless truckloads of random used books from various flea markets at your home the very moment they found out that you like to read?

[–] Someonelol 11 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

No but that sounds fucked up. A book collection should be a carefully curated catalog full of things that you personally love or find great use for, not some sad eclectic mix that looks like a hoarder's pile.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Unless you have a giant library to fill

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 hours ago

Thats so cruel. When I mention I like to read my family drops off endless amounts of books at my doorstep.

[–] outhouseperilous 7 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

This shit seems weirdly disposal/consumerism focused.

Fuck all of this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago

Well she is big on giveaways, as long as you’re not “cleaning“ while in fact dumping tons of junk on family members who are equally convinced “oh yeah maybe someday I’ll totally wear this…“

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not sure why you're conflating "don't hoard things you don't need" with consumerism.

There's certainly ways to do that irresponsibly, but it's not part of the philosophy.

[–] outhouseperilous 1 points 1 hour ago

Im sure the other extreme isn't great

But then, hoarding is usually a reaction to poverty.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

But... Stephen King alone has written 65 novels...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

That he remembers writing between all the coke he did

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

I’ve seen interviews with him where he mentioned: ‘I was reading a synopsis of a story that sounded really interesting’ only to discover that it was about a book that he had written. And apparently he has no memory of writing Cujo.

There’s ‘doing coke’ and ‘doing coke so much I forgot I wrote a fucking best selling novel’.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 hours ago

I'm making a push to hoard my books a little more organized. With the space I have on my e-reader, I could easily have thousands of books.

And I intend to take advantage of that. And I think I might keep a local git repo just for the sake of making sure regex formatting changes don't fuck things up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Godamn, I feel bad about the one book I'm reading on top of the next book "I may or may not read."