Growing up in a family household that was overflowing with books, I actually didn't feel like I had that many books in my house to begin with, but I still knew I definitely had at least a handful of books that don't really mean anything to me. After sorting through I was actually surprised how many books I was happy to give away! Basically when sorting I decided that the book sparked joy if I either wanted to read it eventually, or if I enjoyed reading it and I would recommend it to a friend. Based on this process, it turns out that close to half of the books that I owned were items I only really kept because I already had them. There were a couple of white elephant gifts or mystery bag books that were never really my jam to begin with, along with many cheap or free books that I picked up just because the cover appealed to me, despite having no interest in the genre or style. I guess it's true what they say about judging a book by its cover

Because donation centers and bookstores are operating at a limited capacity due to the pandemic (and the shops that aren't... really should be, so I'd rather not support them!), I couldn't just drop all my stuff at one donation center and call it a day. Giving things away has been a pretty slow process because of this, and all my things are kind of getting squared away in different corners of my community. I'll go more in depth to this in a later blog entry, but for books in particular I had an idea to take a tour of all the tiny libraries in my area and drop off a couple of books at each one as I go along. I thought it would be a nice excuse to get outside in a safe capacity during lockdown and see new parts of my city. I really had it in my head that I'd get dressed up for this and make it into a whole tiny library date with my boyfriend! Well.... I sat on this blog post for months and months waiting to get around to it and at this point I can safely say that this idea never came to be  I still think it was a cute idea that I'd love to go along with someday, but this whole year I've just been insanely busy and I never ended up finding the energy for it somehow.

However, my idea wasn't totally bust! It turns out a neighbor of mine was also thinking about tiny libraries, and kicked off a huge project to create several brand new tiny libraries! As part of this initiative, I was actually able to donate a large portion of my old books to the cause. So, one way or another I guess they did end up in my local tiny libraries anyway!

That's just the way the cookie crumbles, huh!