Having moved twice in recent years, with a growing library of books, I recognize a lot of these issues / traits. I do have a few “unread” and a few “incompletely read” but I doubt that’s more than 2%. So many different ways to organize the reasons for keeping different selections of books, though in my case a large proportion are all relatively recent acquisitions, but I would never dump a book because I didn’t approve of it … it seems I need to own any book I have an opinion about … an opinion based on having read it that is 🙂
The hardest category are those that seemed important to know, but ended-up partly read after leaving me cold, no real opinion either way … kept just in case I will see them differently in some future context.
[Post Note Dec 7th : Had to add this link to a piece by Clive James, touching on very similar material about his disorganized writing space, but also bringing in Clausewitz and the chaos of entropy (the fog of war) from which order often emerges. Also had to add it because his previous week’s magazine piece … on the recently released film of the Bader-Meinhof story … was equally witty, but a little too pontificatory for many of his readers.]