Once in a while I am known to read a book. The fact that I am not a voracious reader has not kept me from accumulating a fairly decent number of books over the last 50 years. I even have a room in my house which is referred to as the library simply because most of the books that I own reside there on a set of shelves.

I have old textbooks, some of which I have read completely and some I have read only the portions necessary for completing an assignment. I have a few John Grisham books. The Wendell Berry books are my favorites, and many of them I have read multiple times over. History books. Bible study books. Coffee table books which never made it to the coffee table. Joke books. Cartoon books, like my Far Side Collection. Horticulture books (of course). And my books on Mayberry.

Books are the window to the imagination. They expand the horizon. They tease the mind to think of what might have been or what could be.

Now, before you begin to think that I am some sort of egg-head scholastic, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t read my first complete book until I was in the 8th grade and that was a hundred page paperback from the book club called “Dirt Track Summer.” Not exactly the Hobbit.

In contrast, my sister had read her way through the stories of Little Women, Nancy Drew, and Huck Finn by time she was 12 years old. My interest in reading was slow to develop and to this day has not gained an impressive amount of momentum.

Consider the fact that I read slowly. Some people can just scan the page and keep up with the flow of the story or the path of the argument being made. They can read a 300 page book in one sitting. Not me. I read every word, on every line, in every paragraph. And sometimes I’ll read a sentence twice. My brain is just not wired to consume content at breakneck speeds.

Right now I am reading a 478 page book. I have been at it for hours over the last two days and have managed to blaze through to page 160. This may take a while.

My snail’s pace can partially be explained by the content of this book. The title is “A Brief History of Nearly Everything.” It is written by a reputable novelist, who as a non-scientist is attempting to explain to other non-scientists, like me, some of the more complicated scientific discoveries of the last 600 years and how their work helps to account for our existence in this universe.

Sounds titillating, right? It’s a heavy read, but I also find myself laughing out loud and exceptionally intrigued by the personalities, blunders, and incredible depth of the brainiacs in the field of science who have and still are figuring out how our world is put together.

I look at a windup toy and wonder how it works. They look at galaxies millions of light years away, or the atoms all around us that we can’t see and ask the same questions that I ask about the toy. Reading has a way of letting me know how much I don’t know.

On the other end of the spectrum, I spend a good deal of time in my other reading room turning the pages of some of my favorite books of far less noble content than the ones I keep in the library. I have a small shelf that sits against the wall across from the reading stool. When one sits there, it is only natural to read for a spell.

One title that I never tire of is called “The Bathroom Bulletin”. It is packed full of tiny tidbits of information in a compact format that can be read in two minutes or perhaps longer, depending on how much time I feel like dedicating to reading.

This book is a wealth of impressive information. For example, in 2018 four ambitious gents from the UK built a toilet on wheels that set a new world speed record for toilets at over 70.5 mph. I never knew there was an old record. I also never actually thought about putting wheels on a toilet.

A 48-year-old Belgian man, in 2019, sat on a toilet for 116 straight hours just to prove that he could. The bathroom he chose for this ambitious feat was located inside the local tavern. Some who witnessed this event said that a beer or two might have been involved.

One surprising bit of useful information is that the average American will use about 634 miles of toilet paper over the course of his lifetime. This may help explain the frantic removal of toilet paper from the grocery store shelves prior to the arrival of a snowstorm in Georgia. Nobody wants to be caught without an adequate supply.

As you might can tell, the scope of my interest in reading is diverse, to say the least, and perhaps even concerning to those who care about my mental health. What a man reads is what he shovels into his mind, and what he holds in his mind is largely responsible for how he thinks about the world. It is strange, I admit, that I find an equal interest in the curve of the universe and bathroom humor.

What got me thinking about my books is that I have decided it is time to clean house a little bit. I have a few that I want to keep, but for the most part I have many, many books that are doing nothing but taking up space and collecting dust. I’m not gonna read most of them again, or in some cases for the first time if I haven’t read them by now.

My youngest daughter, Emily, came by the house yesterday for the sole purpose of going through my books to see if there was anything she wanted for herself. She touched every spine and flipped through most every page. Some I could tell her about. Some belonged to her mom. She left here with a couple of small tubs of books that really didn’t put a dent in what I have left to relocate to a new home.

Sometimes, getting rid of a book is like getting rid of an old friend. A story that inspired me. An experience that helped me grow in my view of things. A collection of nostalgia that made me remember the days of old. A character that made me laugh or weep or dream.

I’ve been to enough yard sales to know that there are millions upon millions of discarded books out there that will likely never have a home. They are destined to disappear into the landfill or the incinerator. And if that’s where my books end up, so be it.

So, I’m letting them go. I’m inviting friends and family to take a look if they want. The vast majority of books I really don’t care about any longer.

But “The Bathroom Bulletin”, I’m keeping for now.