Book lovers, shut your ears for this one. You're going to be outraged, horrified and appalled. There's many of you that hold onto your books like precious gems, have visions of wall to wall books in veritable libraries. I know. I'm one of you. But detachment is a practice, and frees you from the burdens of ownership. I've never regretted anything I've thrown away, only the things that burden me. The older I get, the more minimalist I want to be, even though it's been a practice of a life time. I hate posessions owning me - always have. Somehow I've made an exception for books.

I am getting rid of my books.

Well, not all of them - I'm keeping the reference books, like my fermentation cook book or how to build an earth oven, a collection of travel books, and our nearly fully set of Zola and Murakami, because they are nearly full sets, plus that copy of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which I adored at 23 and which broke me into the world of literature beyond the classics. I keep Richard Flanagan's 'Long Road to the Deep North' and 'Death of a River Guide', Neil Gaiman's 'Anansi Boys', Tim O'Brien's 'In the Lake of the Woods', two tomes of Australian and American literature, Steinbeck's 'To a God Unknown' and a short story collection of zombie and apocalyptic fiction. My book shelves start looking clean, tidy and beautiful in a minimalist, functional way.

We're going through a process of becoming unencumbered.

What a delightful word 'unencombered' is. It's been rattling around in my head for weeks.

unencumbered
/ʌnɪnˈkʌmbəd,ʌnɛnˈkʌmbəd/
adjective
not having any burden or impediment.
"he needed to travel light and unencumbered"
free of debt or other financial liability.

'I just want to be *unencumbered', I say, as I take another book from the shelf. I've had some of these books for thirty years. Three copies of 'The Handmaid's Tale'. An old Penguin of the Upanishads. Winton, McCarthy, Angelou, Wyndam. All fly across the room into boxes. Mitchell, Coetzee, Saramego, Carey.

'Are you sure', the man says more than once. We agree for the fourteenth time that we haven't read many of these for years, and aren't likely to. We agree 'lugging them to Tasmania' - lugging being another good word - is tedious.

lug
/lʌɡ/
verb
gerund or present participle: lugging
carry or drag (a heavy or bulky object) with great effort.
"she began to lug her suitcase down the stairs"

'No pockets in a shroud', I say. It's something the old folk say. You can't take stuff with you when you die. It's best to lighten the load. It's liberating.

Huxley goes, and Allende. I advertise and people come and collect Orwell and books about sailing and travelling alike. Not all go - many will go to a charity shop. The more I get rid of, the happier I feel about this decision.

When I first met my husband, he lived in a library lorry, ironically enough. His bookshelf contained some fifty books. I fell in love with him because he had Dostoyesky next to the Dalai Llama, Modern Mechanics next to Buddhist Cosmology, Stephen King next to the Koran. You could do worse than a man who read books. I had boxes of books at home in Australia, we take boxes from the UK back. Our books nestle up against each other, lovers.

Somehow you expand to fill the space you are in. The bigger the bookshelf, the more books you keep. But there will be more books, from charity shops and libraries and yard sales. They'll come and go, fill our heads with poetry and wanderlust. They don't need to be kept, covered in dust.

I want to hug them, one by one, and I do some. I flick through their pages, smile at annotations, shake out postcards from Berlin, Barcelona, Bangkok, a photo of us at a souk in Marocco in 2005, a ticket stub from a Hawkwind concert.

There's a process of detachment that occurs as I unencumber.

But it feels good.

With Love,

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