Old Books

The photo above shows a bunch of my old college textbooks I found lying around when I was in the process of organizing the storage room of my basement ( The work to finish our basement was completed about a month ago. The vast majority of the basement is completely empty now ( with nice floors, walls, ceilings, lights, etc. ) and most of the stuff that used to be strewn about the entire basement is now jammed into a single storage room that takes up about 25% of the basement. The storage room is so full that you can barely move inside it. The only way we'll ever be able to find anything in there is by taking an inventory of everything in the storage room and getting rid of anything that we really don't need ). I've come to the conclusion that the time has finally come to get rid of these old textbooks.

I've been holding on to all of them for the last 20 years of so. I always kinda figured they'd be good to have it I ever needed to brush up on my Math/Science/Engineering. Sure, I could have sold back most of them to the campus bookstore when I graduated ( and I did do that with some of my books ), but considering that the store would have only given me about $10 dollars a book for books I spent $50 to $60 each on ( which at the time, seemed like A LOT of money - especially considering inflation over the last 20 years and the fact that I was a poor college student at the time ), I figured it made sense to hold on to them. Sure, I was going into a field ( software development ) which didn't really require me to use my Engineering education, but I figured I'd hold on to the books just in case the the software development thing didn't work out.

Well, more than 16 years have passed since then, and I'm still working as a software developer. There are certainly times when I hate my job, but I really couldn't see myself doing any other kind of work for the rest of my life ( Well, unless I had the guts to take a big pay cut, but I'm not going to risk that anytime soon with two little kids and a big mortgage ). I'm probably never going to need to brush up on the information in those books ever again, and even it I did, a musty old book isn't the source I would use. As I looked over all these old books a few weeks ago, it suddenly occurred to me that they've invented this thing called The Internet, and I hear that you can use this Internet thing to look up just about anything. If I really wanted to brush up on my Vector Mechanics, Thermodynamics, or Laplace Transformations, I could use this new-fangled Google thing, and I'd be good to go.

So, I've decided that the books have got to go. They're just taking up space, and they could do the world a lot more good if they were available for somebody to read in a public library. So, I've decided that I'll be making a trip to my local public library soon. I've now got the books in a box in my garage, and as soon as I find some spare time on a Saturday, I'll be taking a trip to the library.

Still, I must admit that I'm really not in a rush to do this. As much as it makes sense to get rid of the books, I think I still have a little bit of sentimental attachment to most of them. There are a lot of memories in those books, and part of me wants to hold on to them so Michael and Peter can use them someday. However, as heartwarming as the idea of passing my books down to my kids might be, I'm sure they won't want to look at some musty old books when they'll probably be able to look at every book in the world using some Kindle-type device.

Still, I'm already shown two of my books ( Calculus and Robotics ) to Michael, and the books still sit in a box in my ultra-crowded garage.

Well, I guess we'll see what happens, but if this is the end for my old books, I just wanted to given them a proper send-off in this blog post.

Well, I'll be signing off now. I wanted to write more this month, but things have been really busy both at home and at work. Hopefully, I'll blog a lot more in November.

Rich