During our last month in the States before moving to Amsterdam, I was spending a lot of time taking inventory of our house and trying to figure out what could come with us, and what had to go. We were living in a three bedroom, two bath house in Kentucky, which seems ludicrous now. We sold two cars, a motorcycle, three couches, an elliptical machine, a 50 inch TV, two stereos, countless odd pieces of furniture and most tragically for me—four floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, full of a lifetime’s worth of books.

My whole life I’ve been an avid reader and I was incredibly proud of my library. The bookshelves were in our bedroom and I loved to look over my collection. Like most girls, I dreamed of having a library worthy of Belle, dark and woody, with ladders and a fireplace, and lots of squishy chairs. Or maybe it would be the opposite—bright and airy with lots of plants and natural light. Either way, I was positive my future life would contain a library. A proper dedicated room for all my books.

When I moved from apartment to apartment in the States, I would pack up dozens of boxes with great pride and label them “heavy! books!”

“Ugh,” I would exclaim wearily. “Why do I have so many books? I’ve got to get rid of some of these many, many books!”

I was fooling no one. The best part of moving somewhere new was unpacking the book boxes, taking each treasure out and lovingly placing it on the shelf, like decorating the Christmas tree with family heirlooms.

Library sales, hand-me-downs, advance copies, signed copies, brand-new hardbacks, trade papers, fluffy mass markets. The only kind of book that wasn’t on my shelf was the borrowed kind. I’ve gotten more relaxed when loaning out my own books (just taking it as a given that I’ll never again see my copy of The Three Musketeers that I loaned to Cliff in, like, 2008), but I still smugly pride myself on returning everything I’ve ever been loaned myself.

I became pretty nihilistic about the sentimental objects I’d collected over the years, tipping several tons of photographs and love notes into the garbage without a second thought. This, I reasoned, would make the things I decided to keep all the more precious. I’m not completely heartless, and there are still two or three boxes of middle ground that I couldn’t pitch or justify shipping taking up space in my mom’s attic, but suffice it to say I threw away a lot.

To ship all of those heavy! books! over to the Netherlands would have been prohibitively expensive, though, and it seemed silly to pack them up and store them at my mom’s house, waiting for what exactly? So I steeled my nerves and prepared to make a small fortune selling my books to the thrift shops.

I approached my bookshelves with a calculated strategy. Anything I’d already read with zero sentiment attached went immediately into the “sell/donate” pile; anything I hadn’t read went into a “to be considered” pile; and the well-worn extra specials that I would risk harm in order to rescue from a fire went into a “pay an arm and a leg to ship to Holland” pile. After negotiating through a few in-between piles, and properly considering the “to be considereds” I was still left with an unreasonably large stack that I wasn’t prepared to part with.

This was proving much harder than I’d anticipated, and although I first tried to dismiss my tears as anxiety and exhaustion about the move, I soon had to reckon with the fact that I was actually grieving quite a bit over the loss of my library.

I am a reader, after all. Who am I without my books?

I made at least five trips to Half-Priced Books, borrowing the store’s shelving cart to haul my precious beloveds from the car to be picked through. It was harrowing, and I’m still not entirely recovered. I did make about $500, though, so there’s that.

42 books got saved and came with me to Amsterdam. Most were ones I hadn’t read yet and thought I should. Some were ones that seemed important at the time, but turned out to be pretty unnecessary. There are 18 books, though, that actually turned out to be essential. These are the ones I’m relieved I kept because they live in the core of my identity and without them I would be a little more lost:

• Harry Potter 1-4 boxed set along with first American editions of 5, 6 and 7 (if comfort food can be stitched and bound, this is surely it)
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (with shattered spine and multiple pages lovingly repaired with scotch tape)
• Matilda by Roald Dahl (completely yellow, with “Not for Resale” stamped along the pages and “For Katie” written in pencil beside it)
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (in case of real emergency)
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (in terms of sheer pleasure per page it doesn’t get any more economical than slim Gatsby)
• Ordinary People by Judith Guest (with margin notes from Mr Mahaffey’s freshman English class)
• Cat Stories by James Herriot (because I love my mommy)
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (page 117, “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” has a giant dog-earred crease)
• The World According to Garp by John Irving (because everybody needs an answer when asked “what’s your favorite?”)
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (because I love my daddy)
• Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (en francais!)
• Charlotte’s Web by EB White (a first edition from 1952 with “Miss Brown Room 9” written in the top right corner)

The other 24? Well, one thing the great purge of 2014 taught me is that most books are just lifeless things that can be repurchased and replaced. My Amsterdam bookshelf is rapidly getting out of control, but I’m a little less precious about my books than I used to be. Save for those special few, I don’t need the hard evidence proving the depths of my addiction. I give books away and buy Kindle versions, and don’t even think about my special room with ladders anymore.

Or, at least, not as often.