Booking Through Thursday: Bookshelves

“How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on?”

This week’s BTT makes me stare around my apartment kind of guiltily.  I keep meaning to reorganize my bookshelves.  There’s just me here, so the books in the living room and the bedroom are all mine.   I remember moving here about two years ago, and feeling sort of disconnected and alien in my house.  What it took to change that feeling, and feel like home, was setting up the bookshelves.  And it took a few weeks to get over the glee that they were ALL my books.  (I’d lived with a roommate before, so was used to the living room as not being my dedicated bookshelf space.)

I wish my bookshelves were better organized.  They’ve gotten jumbled lately, and are overdue a thorough going-over.  For the most part, bedroom bookshelves are reserved for the beloved comfort books, the ones I grab when I need to read a few pages here and there.  Some worn books from childhood, favorite poets.  Cozy books.

The living room is full of books I’d probably loan out to people.   And the shelves have an intuitive organization.  Or so I like to think.  Cookbooks and foodie fiction in the shelf by the kitchen.   Poetry next, with misc facts and history books on the shelf below.  Science fiction and mystery in the corner right by my cozy reading chair, and then a jumble of my favorite fiction and nonfiction to loan people.

It sounds pretty organized, but where I need to overhaul is the tendency to smush books on top of these categories, or find an organized spot for my review books, rather than the stacks on the dining room table or the horizontal stacks on two bedroom bookshelves.  I’ve lost books in my apartment more than once.  That does it!  Sunday afternoon!  Major book overhaul, of at least the bedroom!  Yeah!

It’s not like I have an excuse now that football season is over….