Over the years the overcrowding of my shelves has forced me to pare down the collection, to reluctantly concede that while the textbook on Psychology was very interesting and the chapter on critical thinking valuable, it was unlikely I would ever read it again or even need to consult it. So I parted with that, with all the extra NIVs and other such books, one here, several there. It makes one careful in one’s buying, but not careful enough.

Then as times change and books accumulate till there is no extra room on the shelves and all the tops are filling up, then it is time to decide whether to crowd the apartment with more shelves or reluctantly part with some of their burden. Coming back from Ireland where I stayed in streamlined hotel rooms I was impressed at how cluttered up the apartment has become and wondered if it had gone too far.

And so to make room for my growing Science Fiction collection I am gutting out some other sections. Will we ever be so shallow as to read John Piper again? We think not. And the complete works of Sir Francis Schaeffer? No more than the works of Jack Deere, or The Purpose Driven Life or Two Views on Women in Ministry, etc. More hard to conclude that the sitting down and reading through of Karl Barth is not going to occur, or that we really do not need an encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature, the four old National Geographics with articles on Iceland, or . . . well, I’m not going to mention that one.

I’ve parted with many Evangelical fads, all the stuff on Van Til with congratulations to myself for never actually buying any of the stuff he wrote, but for some reason cannot yet bring myself to pare down my ample collection on hermeneutics or to own less than three lexicons each for Greek and Hebrew (actually I have 4 Greek, and that’s only counting Koine as I have one of the Homeric dialect that is not going to be disturbed). Well I might throw out the Logic book as well, as logic never did anything for me.

I’m wavering on the Coppleston paperbacks on philosophy [15] . . . why do I think I’m going to read them when I have yet to read the primary sources? Ah, but they are so convenient for traveling, it seems . . .