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Guest Essay

By Roger Rosenblatt

Mr. Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution. Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of Franklin Pierce you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but not your old books. Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you........

© The New York Times