Give it away, give it away, give it away now

Since Mr. O is currently in the process of cataloguing and selling hundreds of old records (I mean those dusty crates from 1994 that are all labelled "DJ Kashmir" that he thought he'd be giving to his children as an inheritance) I am playing fair and going through my books. I figure four boxes of books (160 pounds worth) is a bit much to ship home *whimper* as much as I hate to get rid of anything. I have amassed a lovely collection of vintage paperbacks (Penguin oranges, Faber and Faber classics) from used book stores in Amsterdam, Stratford, and yes, Toronto, that I smuggled onto my cheap IKEA bookshelf here over the years, and I'm not going to part with those, so many of my Elizabeth Bishop critical works are going into a box in Grandma and Grandpa O's garage for now (thank you Bonnie Costello, University of Harvard Press; it's nothing personal) to be claimed at a later date. I'm also making a bit of wiggle room by dumping Don McKellar movies on VHS and by burning all of our DVDs onto a hard drive and selling the discs for super cheap. Moving is at present the driving factor in our digital shift...

But I'm not cheating my way through this, and I managed to clear out a whole box worth of books (*muffled sob*). I know you're all wondering: what am I giving away? A short list of sacrifices:

*Eudora Welty The Optimist's Daughter - standard Vintage paperback bought at a flea market for 50 cents
*Finland - The Northern Experience, New Europe and the Next Millenium
*Carol Shields' Jane Austen bio
*An extra copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
*Jamaica Kincaid Annie John -- Postcolonial 101 but a hideous edition
*Pietro Aretino The School of Whoredom -- Ill-chosen book club casualty
*Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
*A Discovery guide to Mauritius
*A cheap edition of Dorian Gray
*The Rough Guide to Techno
* JM Coetzee's Youth (I'm wavering on this one, it was a gift)
*The Paris Review # 177 (with Shakespeare and co. stamp)
*Confessions of an Opium Eater (you would think it's interesting but it's kind of not)
*A Taschen mini coffee table book on Berlin interiors
*Simone de Beauvoir Today (today being 1982)
*Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (I love East-coast girls with boy names)
*A lovely looking book called Monsoon Diary that Mr. O gave me and I never read
*The Writing Life by Annie Dillard that I think I "borrowed" from Kali
*A falling-apart Penguin Vanity Fair
*A falling-apart Penguin Ovid's Erotic Poems that was found inexplicably amongst digital marketing textbooks at my former workplace that I thought I could give a good home...I was wrong
*The United Arab Emirates Yearbook 2003
*MG Vassanji's The In-between World of Vikram Lall in hardcover (apologies to Morgan)
*Anthony Bourdain in Finnish translation Kobraa Lautasella
*A free chapbook from a Kiasma exhibit

Okay, so maybe not a sacrifice after all, but a much-needed spring cull. It's Round 2 that will be the bitch...