The Great Book Sort – Journey Home

Ambient temperature reached 87 degrees on Saturday in Big Grove. On Sunday it dropped to the 50s, and Monday, it was below freezing. Not really Spring, is it? The lilacs appear to be surviving the temperature fluctuation… so far. It is hard to know what will hold.

While it’s still cold, I’ve been working on The Great Book Sort — more boxes of books to the public library used book sale, and a growing “to be read” bookcase. The project asks a question in 2026 America: What will get our attention?

Books are an easy answer. They are disconnected from the digital world and the daily discipline of reading at least 25 pages lends itself to both respite from society’s noise and engagement in new things. That hour a day with a book, and selecting the next one, are needed forms of intellectual engagement.

What else?

Let’s cross off some things. We don’t watch television in our house — no antenna nor subscription to cable television service. I am not a gamer. The extent of my computer gaming was stopping once at a truck stop during a blizzard and playing a Pac-Man console for a quarter. Mother showed me how to play Solitaire on her work computer when I visited her. Radio is something for listening in the car, or while working in the garage. It never gains my complete attention. Since the Saturday lineup on Public Radio was disassembled — about the time Garrison Keillor left A Prairie Home Companion the second time — that era ended. Mostly I listen for favorite tunes and to see which political groups are advertising.

If I know you and you send me an email, I will read it. Email is my most used social media application. I remember presenting a case for email to a company I worked for because it connected everyone in a global organization at my previous employer. They did not sign up right away. I also read texts, but contrary to popular culture, they are less immediate to me than email.

When our child streams on Twitch, I turn it on and have it in the background. My main interest is the sound of a familiar voice, someone with whom I have been since their beginning.

I read two newspapers: The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Solon Economist. The former recently changed hands and format. The jury is out on whether I will continue. The latter was recently purchased by the Daily Iowan and is gravitating toward being a college newspaper in most respects. Two of them for now, about 10 minutes for each edition.

Bluesky is my social media account and I check in repeatedly throughout the day. I follow 88 other accounts and there is not a lot of action. It is a good source of national and world news.

The rest of my attention goes to work, family, and a few friends, mostly centered around home, cooking, cleaning, writing, home repairs, and gardening. On a chilly day most of the work is indoors.

I am currently reading The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu. The premise and business model most often used has been providing free diversion in exchange for a moment of consideration. Such attention is harvested, then sold to the highest-bidding advertiser. I’m sure my attention has been harvested. With some products, I’m not even aware of it, yet I can think of only a few instances where it hooked me.

For example, I watched the appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. That summer, I bought a trade paperback book about the Beatles at the corner drug store. In the fall I went with Mother to the King Korn Stamp Redemption Center. The television show had me thinking I could be a musician. I remember a light snow falling on us as we returned to the car with my new Kay acoustic guitar.

As The Great Book Sort continues, I harvest my own memories while touching books I bought for many reasons, the least of which was whether it was advertised. When spending my attention on a life imperfectly lived, there is hope I can avoid the pitfalls of the attention economy.

Sometimes I simply want to walk on the state park trail and pay attention to the sunrise of a new day. For now, that is enough.

Pre-dawn light on the state park trail, March 23, 2026.

Tired woman in the library. — Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

We are out of storage space in the house, so something has to go.

Before the library’s March 7, annual used book sale, I donated more than 600 books. It was pleasurable seeing them laying on tables in the main meeting room while people browsed through them. I hadn’t realized how many French language books I had until I saw them together in a box on a table. The donation process continues. I named it “The Great Book Sort” and made an entry on my daily planner with no ending date.

This is a form of curation unlike others I began. My process is developing, yet the main activities were to clear my five-foot-squared sorting table and place a box or two at a time on it. As I take them out of the box, some go directly into the stacks in my writing space, others into a box for donation. The rest are divided into piles to keep, maybe to keep, books that can easily be checked out from the library, and those relegated to the garage or to the bedside table. By the time I’m done, the 3,000 spaces in my writing room will reflect my reading life, and part of my intellectual history.

I did some advance work. First, I decided the only authors whose works I will keep in their entirety are Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, William Carlos Williams, and John Irving. They rest on the top shelf to my left, watching over my every activity.

I mentioned my nine shelves of poetry in another post. There is a presidential history section which needs curating. Same with art books, regional history, reference books, farming-related books, and American Studies topics (native, black, women, and pioneer culture).

I began culling cookbooks. The two remaining shelves are ones I expect to use and the rest are either gone or in several boxes in the stacks to be reviewed once more, then likely donated. We have a project list that includes a new cabinet in the dining room for cookbooks. We are a distance from actually getting that. The recipes I keep in the kitchen are handwritten in spiral bound books and a collection of papers clipped together. Mostly this system works.

Part of this curation will be to refine the categories of what is on the shelves. Right now there are too many categories.

A home library is personal. My story in books is evolving from random collections into something more usable in daily life. I will never read everything again, yet the comfort of good books, carefully curated and surrounding me is a net positive. The Great Book Sort is a project worth doing.