Many like me like to read from physical books rather than audiobooks or e-books. There is a great pleasure in scribbling your thoughts on the paper, underlining sentences, talking to the author in the margins. But after you have read the book what do you do with it? Like many, I wanted to keep a nice book collection in my room. Showing it to my guests the wonderful books that I have read and talk about them. The book collection adds a intellectual or artistic touch to your room.

One day I came across a post in r/books titled

My mom died in the UK and has nearly 4000 books. What’s the best way to get rid of them, how can I sell them?

Meaninglessness of life, Randomness of events, Human mortality; having these at the back of your mind can help you avoid doing things that only have superficial value. When you remind yourself that you will die, you realise that there is no point in hoarding things. Books have the immense potential to change an individual’s perspective on life, ideas and thoughts. The only way I felt a book can serve its full potential, is to give the book to someone who can appreciate the book, and ask them to do the same. In this way, you can make sure that book is being read by someone and hopefully enjoying the book. It is tempting to keep the book as a memory, but remember what will be its fate when you are gone. As Steve Jobs mentioned in Stanford Commencement speech

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

When you love a book, you want it to sting and bite other people the way it did to you, so that you share the same mysterious beautiful feeling. But there is also a chance that your message might not be passed on and someone in the chain might attempt to hoard it. The best one can do to prevent such treachery is to leave a message at the end of the book that goes something like this.

message at end of book

A message I left on the last page of 1984 novel

Post Scriptum

  • Another noble thing that can be done is to donate the book to a library. But the book might have to wait for a long time in the shelf to be picked up. A good side effect of giving the book in person is you introduce new books to people. There is also a chance of developing a readers’ circle in your vicinity

  • Of course, you don’t have to give away all the books that you have read. There is always at least one book that you might have planned to re-read occasionally to grasp it completely, to extract all the juice out of it. (For me that book is Godel, Escher, Bach)

  • The phrase sting and bite was taken from Kafka’s quote

    Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

  • Link to the Reddit Post

  • Link to Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech. It is an amazing speech, you ought to listen it completely at least once.