Category: Personal

This week’s question is suggested by Kat:

I recently got new bookshelves for my room, and I’m just loving them. Spent the afternoon putting up my books and sharing it on my blog . One of my friends asked a question and I thought it would be a great BTT question. So from Tina & myself, we’d like to know ‘How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on?’

 Storage is a problem. I haven’t got enough space for all my books so they are double shelved where possible and also in piles in different rooms. I have fiction arranged a-z by author surname in bookcases in the dining room and I keep the unread books in a separate bookcase in the lounge. This seemed like a good idea when I started it but doesn’t work because there is no room to transfer them to the other bookcases when I’ve read them. So now that bookcase is a mixture of books I’ve read and books to-be-read. I also have one bookcase mainly containing children’s books in a spare bedroom – not arranged in any order – just as I put them on the shelves. These are a mixture of my own books from childhood, including some that were my parents’ childhood books and some from my sister who collected secondhand books.

I arrange non-fiction a-z by subject and within that a-z by author surname. These are mainly in bookcases lining one wall in the hall at the back of the house with some on two small bookcases on the landing. One of these is the bookcase my Dad made me for my bedroom when I was about 8. It doesn’t look anything special – just a three shelf wooden bookcase he painted white, but I could never part with it. It’s looking a bit the worse for wear now. I keep a mixture of books in it –  including literature, Shakespeare plays etc, biographies, and history books.

The books in piles are a mixture. They are in most rooms – I’m not very tidy. Some are books I’ve looked at and read a chapter or a few pages before deciding whether to start them properly, some are books I’m reading and others are books I’ve read and not put away because I either want to re-read them or write about them and some because there’s no room to put them on the bookshelves.

Since ‘Inspiration’ is (or should be) the theme this week €¦ what is your reading inspired by?

It should be easy to say what influences or motivates me to read – I love reading and books, it’s what I do whenever I have the time and I make time to do it. But it’s not that simple, reading is a learned skill; it doesn’t come naturally like breathing for example. I suppose I was influenced by my parents, by my mother who always had a book on the go and my father who loved reading and telling me stories. I learned to read before I went to school, probably because I wanted to read the stories to myself and then because I loved the way stories take you into another world.

I read to learn and find out more about a subject, when I’m bored, when I want entertainment – something funny, something serious, something to make me think. Sometimes I want to read something different to broaden my horizons, about places I can never hope to visit and people I can never meet. Sometimes it’s the words themselves that are inspiring, the way they flow and sound and bring scenes to life before my inner eye; and sometimes it’s the plot, the story and the characters that interest me and I want to know what happens next.

 I’m inspired to read by many things – libraries, bookshops, TV, radio, book reviews, book lists, nature, science, religion, philosphy etc, etc and by other people – personally and through their blogs. Really, I can’t think of anything that doesn’t inspire me to read.