Book Piles

Published on by Margaret

I decided yesterday that I was tired of having my fiction double shelved and spent most of the afternoon taking books off the shelves and rearranging them. The result is that I now have the fiction separated into read and unread shelves and a pile of non-fiction with nowhere to go. At the moment they’re on the floor in the hall waiting to be sorted.

When we moved here 17 months ago I shelved the non-fiction quickly, trying to put them in roughly subject order but they got hopelessly mixed up. So now I’m going to get them in order, sort what to keep, shelve what I can and box up the rest. It’s amazing how much time this takes, not helped by me stopping to look at whatever takes my fancy.

But now I can see all the fiction at a glance, which has made me more determined than ever not to buy any more books for a good long time. After saying last week that I was only going to buy a book when I’d read six of the unread books, I did acquire 7 more books during the week. My excuse is that the one brand new book that came in the post was one I’d ordered some weeks ago. As for the other 6 books, they’re not really purchases as I got them from Barter Books in exchange for 15 books I’d taken in, so I’m not counting them!

I’ve finished reading two books this week, so now I really won’t buy any more books until I’ve read at least 4 more of my own.

And I’m really going to enjoy standing in front of my shelves and deciding what to read next.

11 thoughts on “Book Piles”

  1. Margaret, I think it always makes us feel good when we’ve sorted through our books and gotten them into a new order. I laughed at your statement “I’m really..” – me too! I can’t even imagine how many books I’m going to have to prune from my shelves when I finally unpack everything in upcoming months. I suspect I’m going to be giving books away to all sorts of places – library, swap site, maybe the blog – who knows? LOL

    Enjoy your newly arranged shelves and enjoy sorting through the books to keep or give away. 🙂

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  2. Margaret – Oh, I know just what you mean about not wanting to buy any more books for a l-o-n-g time. I give you so much credit for working through your collection and trying to make some sense of it. I need to do the same thing…

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  3. We have our shelves separated into fiction and nonfiction, and I have done the nonfiction by subject and chronologically too (i.e., the history books) to make it easier to find something when we want it. Fiction is harder for me to categorize, although I do have the mysteries separated out. But I find that “playing with” the books can be very fun and relaxing!

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  6. Is not counting books that come through barter like not counting calories that you eat when you’re standing up? My favourite sort of accounting:)

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  8. Good luck with your not book-buying. I managed to buy get 11 books to read over the last week, so my non-shelved pile is getting even bigger (not that I’m complaining of course, its nice to know that I’m not going to run out of reading any time soon)

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  9. I was amused at your shelving and sorting and arranging because I think all of us have trouble doing those things. Like you, I have to stop and look through books, and marvel at the ones I’ve forgotten I had, and think how in the world I could ever donate one or whatever. I have to box up books to donate to our local library’s book sale soon and it’ll probably be an all day project.

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  10. I just read your Crossing to Safety review that you linked to on my blog–I couldn’t find a place to comment under the post, so I wanted to let you know here how good a review it was. As you know, I loved Angle of Repose, and now have Crossing to Safety on order. It definitely sounds satisfying, thought-provoking, and interesting.

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  11. Hi Margaret,
    Having culled all the books that I had up on my Amazon shop, I still think that I have about 600 fiction books that I don’t want to part with until I have read them and Dave has a large pile of non-fiction, that he feels the same about.

    We have just ordered two more large bookcases, now that I can at least see the floor in my office, but I just know that they are still going to be double stacked!!

    I haven’t bought any new books for about a week now, but you can’t count author/publisher requests, can you? That would be plain rude and churlish, now wouldn’t it? !!!
    Any Excuse!!!

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