Sidebar: Tidying Up

When I was 32 and our firstborn was two, I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up, which led to a decluttering of several boxes that made up my home library. Over the previous thirteen years, I had entertained ideas about the books my children would grow up seeing on my shelves. Fast-forward to two years of parenthood, and it no longer felt so imperative that the fat spine of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions take up my son’s imagination. A local shop, which I once bought second-hand books from, was happy to resell what I had collected.