Donating To The Library - When You KNOW You Won't Read It Again

As a teacher-librarian, I get a lot of would-be donations, but rarely something the kids will actually want to read or use. Like the old textbooks the faculty is cleaning out because they're no longer using  them, but for some reason think we're going to be able to use it. And the Jackie Collins epics. And a class set of someone's self-published semi-autobiographical novel, handed to the principal who, looking sheepish, hands them to me, arguing,"She's a former student!"

Once in a while, there's some good stuff - once, I scored twenty-five Aurealis Award YA entries. And of course, my friend Stephanie Campisi gave me a pile of her wonderful YA review copies. I have been donating my own review copies, though recently, I have only been receiving books from Ford Street and Bloomsbury; not sure what's happened to the others, but at least one of the other publishers which had been sending me review books has gone cheap and now offers only Netgalley ARCs for review. I might accept their excuse of,"It's about being environmentally friendly" if they'd stopped printing hard copy books, but they haven't. So I explained, twice at least, that I only review print books, because I can't put ebooks on my library shelves.

Now, I've gone to my own shelves for books that are perfectly good, but which I know in my heart I will never get around to reading again. It will help make space on my home shelves and hopefully the kids will enjoy books that I loved when I read them. A couple of them are personally autographed to me, which makes me feel bad, but what the heck! I bought them, they weren't gifts, and better for them to be read again by the age group for which they were  intended than sit around gathering dust on my overflowing book cases. They 're in excellent condition - I never give away stuff that isn't.

But I feel a little sad. There's a Richard Harland book there, a Scott Westerfeld one(one of our students has recently asked for one of his other books), a wonderful novel by Archie Fusillo... And of course, a couple of recent titles I got for reviewing and have reviewed recently on this site. I am less attached to those ones, because I always intended to donate those. The others were books I bought for me.

So I will have something new to show the students this week.

Meanwhile, I do have some Ford Street titles to finish and review before they land on my library shelves. I am reading DC Green's Monster School, before getting back to review George Ivanoff's final Gamer's novel  and two by Paul Collins which I haven't finished reading and a Tanya McCartney picture book, which I need to unearth from my pile of books and papers.

Better get on to it!