First things first: I mentioned in Day 37’s installment that one of the clipped-out comic strips I found in the garage actually was about cleaning out the garage. I promised I’d share it. Here it is:

Although Pig’s advice to “always … keep … everything” seems pretty sound at this point, I moved ahead with another box today.

Day 38: Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2023

CONTENTS: It’s another box of books. You can’t see clearly see this in the box, but it contains a Clive Barker novel, “Weaveworld,” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” by Tracy Chevalier. Both of those volumes might find themselves in the increasingly cramped Little Free Library in the front yard. The box also contains the second volume of a fantasy trilogy; I seem to have a lot of these second volumes, but rarely can find the first volumes. (The one exception involved the Stephenie Meyer “Twilight” series, which the younger daughter read back in the day. We had all four books in that series, and so I put the first volume in the Little Free Library with a Post-It note attached saying that anyone who knocked on our front door would be welcome to the entire four-book series. No one took us up on that offer. People must have thought it was a trap — or maybe they were just worried that this would commit them to reading all four books.)

DISPOSITION: Most of these books will be donated, including the Freud biography, which I read years ago and is quite good. (And this is way off topic, but if you’re interested in Freud or psychoanalysis or mental illness, let me recommend a new book by Rachel Aviv, “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us.” It’s a fascinating plunge into six case studies, including Aviv’s hospitalization for anorexia when she was 6. I’ll return it to the library in a week or so — because if there’s one thing that “365 Boxes” has taught me, it’s that I should buy fewer books.