"This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven." This is off the opening page of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, considered the third great English fantasy novelist of the century along with Tolkien and T.H. White. I wrote this passage down before tossing the book into the black garbage bag where it joins the company of other books that I had deemed beyond repair: impossibly warped, soaked, ripped, shredded pages, cracked spines, books with covers hopelessly stuck to each other like a teenager's secret copy of Penthouse. There were others that looked perfectly salvageable except for the supremely vile odor. And there are those that you couldn't even touch anymore because they're covered in all sorts of weird gooey stuff. The bad part: I had only been four pages into Titus Groan.

Two days after the flood, on the wall of my house where the floodwater level left its ugly mark I wrote, "September 26, 2009." Partly to remind myself of the futility of material accumulation. But there are sights that could make grown nerds cry.

There's a saying that a man only needs nine books in his life. I am not that man. I am not one of those people who can commit to a monogamous relationship with their books.

Italo Calvino, in If On A Winter's Night a Traveler (my copy I stole from my ex-boss Teddy Boy Locsin), famously categorized books as, to name a few:   the Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages, the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, Books That's Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too, Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer.

After the long, grueling days of cleaning up after September 26, I came up with my own: Books That Are Too Important To Throw Away So You Hold On To Them Even If They Smell Like Shit, Books That You Never Even Thought You Owned, Books You Hail As Masterpieces But Can't Even Remember A Single Passage, Books That Have Water Lilies Between Pages How The Hell Did They Get There?, Books So Unbelievably Moldy They Should Be Donated To A Bio Lab, and Books So Filthy You Get Sick Just By Looking At Them.