Book Nerd Problems: Living With Too Many Books (And NOT Enough Room!)

In my apartment, I approximately have eleven shelves dedicated solely to books. Of course there are other unofficial areas where my books take up space. The dining room table. The window sills. The dresser. The rotunda. The closet. I even took a page from Rory Gilmore and kept books stashed under my bed. I lived in a space virtually dominated by books and while this ostensibly is a book hermit’s paradise; it wasn’t mine. Soon I discovered that most of the books I owned were books that I didn’t like, that were passed on to me by relatives and friends, or were books I said I would get around to reading but never did. Letting these kind of books reside in your home, especially if you live in a small place like mine, is no way to live or for that matter, is one of the worst thing you can do with your books.

I get it. We all want that expansive library in our someday house. We want books wall-to-wall in our tinted Victorian house in the woods next to a serene lake, but I can honestly say that after donating the books that I didn’t feel anything for or that didn’t do anything for me that my someday Beauty and the Beast library will copiously have all the books that I love. So why do so many of us hold onto books that we’re indifferent to? Is rampant consumerism to blame?

Many of us when we purchase our books, whether it’s from a book store, online, or a thrift store, are making a financial investment. One or two books maybe doesn’t add up, but when you’re buying a book on a weekly basis, you’re spending as much as you would if you were to buy a Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte everyday, and that’s assuming that you have enough will power to only buy one book. I don’t even have to mention how crazy expensive book hauls can be if you’re not shopping smart. For many of us, we’re not discarding books because of their price.

Letting go of our books can be very hard. We’re sentimental about them. Reading stories is candy to us and books are obviously a gateway to the candy factory. So when it comes to letting go of a certain book, it triggers the emergency brake in our hearts. At one time, we emotionally invested ourselves in that particular book and just as book veterans know, there are no guarantees. Some books just weren’t meant to be.

Yet when it comes to letting that book go, we fight like hell to keep it. We suddenly morph into social workers and lawyers advocating for the book’s refuge.

The excuses vary. With me, the sheer volume of books was a front I liked to have in my place. It acted as castle, my armor. Without the mass of books, I tended to feel vulnerable. I thought without the books around me, I wouldn’t have anything to go to when I sunk into a Low or when I had nothing to preoccupy my mind. To spare you from a rather long psychoanalysis session, I learned that I simply didn’t need all those books. Even when I suffer a Low, or when I wanted a new book to read, I rarely every reached out to my book shelf. When I did, it was to pick up a book that I loved. Any other time, I’d go to the library. Keeping every book you’ve ever purchased or found may seem impressive to the naked eye, but what are those books actually doing besides taking up space?

What’s more is the problem with keeping the books you dislike or the ones you’ll probably never read. It’s a disservice to books. It’s their purpose to be read and not just one time, but again and again. Keeping these kinds of books significantly hinders this process.

So do them a favor. Donate them. Free up some room in your living quarters. And there are plenty of folks and organizations who’ll be glad to take them.

It’s time to take a hard look at yourself and your books. This last weekend, I donated forty books to a local organization. I’m not saying it was easy sifting through my books, determining which should stay and which should go. These included the books I didn’t like, relative/friend pawned-off books, and books I know I’ll never get around to reading. If the urge does arise, there’s no need to panic. I can always go to the library.

And by the time you’re finished and done, your shelves may look a bit naked, but now you have the space again to fill them up with the books you really love.

Despite Mental Illness: 5 Inspirational Authors

Although implied in some of my posts, I haven’t openly come out and said that I suffer from Depression and Social Anxiety. Only a handful of close people know about it, and even some of them shy away from the subject like it’s a rattlesnake about to bite you. I’ve been reluctant to say anything only because I’m not sure how to get the ball rolling.

I harbor this fear that once people know, they’ll treat me differently (although I am inherently different,) perceive me as incapable of managing high stress (I do fine, thank you,) and possibly consider me weak because ‘it’s all mental.’ And even though I want to say all these empowering things about using cognitive behavior strategies and positive reinforcements, I have to be brutally honest: there are just days when funny cat memes or counting to four do absolutely nothing.

Sometimes I have days where it feels like mold is growing inside of my organs and spreading to my brain. I dream of scrubbing out all the gunk lodged in my brain’s crevices (if brains have them) hoping to clean out whatever is making me so—bleh, suddenly stripped of interest and made immobile.

During this downtime, which initiates the snowball effect, I start to weed through all my past mistakes, which I ultimately construe as failures. I summarize things, which makes me overlook the good parts, which makes me only want to improve myself, which only makes me realize how many times I have tried to improve myself, which I start to realize is a pattern, which I see no one else struggling with, so I conclude there’s no way of getting out of this hamster’s wheel, etc, etc! To summarize, those are what those days seem like to me, and I went years without ever knowing why I thought and felt this way.

Although it’s been several months now since I left therapy, and I’m in no way cured. I still have days like these except they are less severe. Mental illness is a chronic disease, and it’s something you have to carefully manage by taking care of yourself.

People tend to box in those who suffer from mental illness and believe they’re just a bunch of crazies swallowed by their disease, but these people really don’t give us enough credit. Our problems are virtually invisible to the naked eye and thereby treated like it doesn’t exist. Every day we have to battle an army of derisive screams which seems to echo inside our bodies like a canyon. We have only our own voice for support to stop the rock slide from collapsing on us. Yes, we are incredibly strong.

I’m not doomed to be stuck in a perpetual, self-defeating cycle of relentless hopelessness restrained in bed and having to watch the world from a window. I’m able to do things like anyone else. Having mental illness is not the reason we should stop living or be reduced to the bare minimum of just functioning and call it living. We can do more.

Writing has been my third leg for me, and it’s also what lead me to find other writers and authors who face similar challenges.

To no surprise, many authors have advocated the therapeutic benefits of writing. In spite of the stigma that still surrounds people with mental illness, writers are talking over the misinformed, contentious, nebulous noise and revealing their personal battles with mental illness.

Below are my top five authors and poets that have inspired me in some way or who have dealt with mental illness to some capacity.

5) Emily Dickinson

Perhaps the queen of all hermits and warrants a spot on any introvert’s list, Emily Dickinson lived a solitary, reclusive life. Her poetry captured the complexities of the human condition and analyzed our perception of death, expounded by her short, rhythmical lines.

We can only speculate about Emily Dickinson’s state of mental health. She refrained from answering the door and rarely left her room, not even to attend her father’s funeral held at her homestead. Some believe that her aberrant behavior was indicative of agoraphobia or possibly an anxiety disorder; yet Dickinson corresponded with several other writers via letters. No doubt she would have loved Twitter.

So many of us think we have to travel the world and be exposed to unique experience to have something interesting to say, but there’s also taking what you know and just going with it.

4) Sylvia Plath

Her work is contained in the genre of confessional poetry and would later garner her acclaim. She wrote only one novel, The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical story that depicts a girl named Ester interning in a big city and winding up in a mental institution after attempting to kill herself. In Plath’s unabridged journals, we see her lay bare her most empowering, vulnerable, tumultuous feelings in fluid yet raw sentences.

Although Sylvia Plath was never officially diagnosed yet underwent electric shock therapy regardless, she more than likely suffered from some kind of mental illness.

Tragically Plath committed suicide before the release of her novel, but it’s her fervent passion of writing and seeking out life that has always inspired me. There’s a reason so many young women gravitate towards her.

3) J.K. Rowling

Yes, the Harry Potter Author.

Even though I’ve just started reading the Harry Potter series, I’ve known about the author for a long time and stay regularly updated.

Depicted by the press as a rags-to-riches story, J.K. Rowling’s life does at times seem like a fairy-tale, but that’s just the romanced version of it.  She has opened up and talked about the darker parts of her life when she was struggling with Depression and having thoughts of suicide. Once faced with overwhelming adversity, she managed to come out alive on the other side.

The reason I include Rowling on this list is not just because she’s a famous author, but the fact that she didn’t let that time in her life define who she is. From her own pit of despair and hopelessness, she was capable of generating such a story that affected others with an overall amount of goodness and inspired others for the better. We can all use a little bit of that.

2) John Green

John Green is one of the loudest in-a-good-way advocates of mental illness and is forthcoming about his struggles with Anxiety and Depression. At one time, his mental condition was so severe it kept him from completing his Looking For Alaska, until he eventually sought treatment. While Green is receiving a lot of attention lately and is probably the most well-known YA author around, his books are so full of young, humanistic experiences that he not only reminds people of their emotional capacity but is also an example of what you can do after you have your mental illness under control. You can end up doing great things.

1) Libba Bray

Libba Bray. Oh, Libba Bray.

When I first read a Libba Bray book, I thought my heart was going to do a Gymnast flip right out of my chest. Her writing is gorgeous and has a knack of filling her pages with such interesting characters. Her stories are just the right kind of bizarre and twisty that if I didn’t have a day job, I would keep reading them, even after finishing them (except for Lair of Dreams because that is just not out…yet.)

Not only am I in love with her books, she’s also an amazing person and candid about her experience with mental illness, and how it was writing that saves her.

Writing kept them going and eventually lead them to doing what they loved. If you know any writers you think should be included on this list, feel free to leave your comments. You can never have too many inspirations.

The Difference Between YA and Adult Dystopia

Dystopian novels have been the new hoard of books pulverizing our field of vision for the last couple of years. Like an avalanche, after reading or even mentioning just one, there’s more to come. With Dystopian novel sales booming with no end in sight, the Dystopian subgenre appears more conducive under the umbrella of Young Adult Fiction than in Adult Fiction. In reading books belonging to both subgenres, I’ve picked up on the nuances between what YA Dystopia and Adult Dystopia contain, which is rendered in their interpretations.

Although it’s clear that both subgenres analyze an ostensible utopian world and use it as a backboard to our own society, YA offers a heavy, pointed, if not, absolute, complaisant critique, while its counterpart, Adult Dystopia, holds to having an open  discussion fostering polemics. Adult Dystopia challenges the concept of universal freedom by prompting us with scenarios that make it hard for us to easily disagree with the politics of the idealized world. Of course, that’s the point. We’re supposed to be just as susceptible and uncertain as the characters are about this world and learn what makes the world ‘not a good place’, except it seems that’s not what we really want to read.

YA Dystopian novels are constructed by a concept of innate desire for freedom. The seeds of liberation are sprung at the beginning of the novel by a single character usually by the story’s protagonist. The YA genre itself consists of stories focused entirely around the protagonist that make it impossible for anything else to happen without the protagonist intervening. Following one of YA’s popular tropes, these stories rely on an individual being special who will be placed on a pedestal at one point seen with characters such as Jonas from The Giver or Katniss in the Hunger Games, the first possessing the rare ability to store humankind’s memories and the other with impressive, esoteric survival skills. What these protagonists share is almost clairvoyance; they can view the distorted world almost immediately. There’s a compulsion to rectify the world and change things to the status quo, which they abstractly but unconsciously know. The story is contingent on the guidance from the protagonist that, without him or her, the story decomposes. It’s also what creates a story where the individual’s actions shape the world whereas Adult Dystopia is more so about the influence of the world on its people.

Adult Dystopia is a quandary; it wrestles with the dark undertones and myopia. Unlike YA Dystopia, Adult Dystopian characters usually have no precedent of freedom. The world and/or government has already conditioned the people and subsequently dehumanized them into thinking of no other alternative. Not that YA Dystopia lacks mature or dark content, with the premise of some of them nightmarish, but there’s usually a subtle hint of hope, even if it’s shoehorned into the bleakest of pieces. Adult Dystopia makes no such concessions, ergo opening a typhoon of unfavorable imaginings that’s not wide-spread entertainment. Turns out, people want happy endings! Go figure.

And these happy endings found in YA Dystopia are usually extended into multiple books contrary to Adult Dystopia novels that are limited (or fully realized) in stand-alone books. YA Dystopia has the advantage of expansion, quintessentially creating new subplots in the overarching story. Adult Dystopia rarely expounds on its stories; however, that’s starting to change.

Although both genres offer a reoccurring recalcitrant theme, it’s undeniable that YA Dystopia is more popular amongst its targeted audience. Built on a semi-fictious world and characters, YA Dystopia ends up actually being more relatable to its young adult audience versus Adult Dystopia. The themes in dystopia resonant with young adults, who feel locked away in schools, their lives dictated by their teachers and parents. It’s no surprise young adults can relate. Adult Dystopia touches on these issues too, but they’re not as palpable to adults who, for the most part, have a choice and ultimately are responsible for their decisions (yay for adulting…) And adults reading YA Dystopia isn’t new. As I noted previously, YA Dystopia is a pithy and usually promises some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, whether it’s a moral lesson or a small patch of happiness amiss the rubble. Compared with Adult Dystopia, which can be equally as entertaining, it doesn’t guarantee a happy ending and may just decide to leave you alone at the bottom of a well of despair.

But this isn’t to say that one is superior over the other. Each subgenre is simply but differently conveying stories set in worlds and societies seemingly perfect that are not. The overwhelming demand for Dystopia is not curtailed to only one domain. Each subgenre just meets different needs. And if Dystopia isn’t meeting your needs or you’re exhausted with the barrage of enslavement-scientific-experiment-gone-wrong- genetically-modified reductive plots, fear not, this will pass. Or if you’re crazy about Dystopia and cannot get enough of it, ride the oversaturated market as long as you can, but also, fear not, Dystopian novels won’t disappear entirely.