June 2008

Gid wants to know how I store my books.

I have over 250 books and counting, but I think the number is more like 300+ because I haven’t catalogued all of them. It’s kinda like bailing out a sinking boat. Most of the books are collected over the span of years. I inherited (”rescued” would be more appropriate) a handful from parents and grandparents. Nobody reads them but they were too cool to throw away.

All photographs here are viewable in a larger format. Just click. If the Lightbox doesn’t work, you’ll still get the actual file.

The book stack above resides in a corner of the living room. I convinced my parents that it’s a valid decorating element. Every now and then, I’ll add another book somewhere into the stack or take away something I want to read.

This bookcase is on the landing upstairs. The phone and modem is on top (you can just see the phone). The two bottom shelves hold children’s books and other large format editions.

Most of the books here are either orphan trade paperbacks, and books I don’t read any more. Some are books I can’t leave downstairs, least my parents’s church friends drop by and notice that their godless daughter reads about magic, occultism, Harry Potter and 100 Ways to Cook Children.

And here is where most of the goods are. Nearly all my paperbacks and series are here. I try to keep my series together regardless of the editions, so some creative arrangement is necessary.

As you can see from the photo, I mainly store my books lying down. I get to store a lot more books this way, and because my bookcases are deep, I can double stack them and still have a strip of space left. Anyway, I’m not going to peruse my own library looking like this:

:-|

Some of the spaces in the lower half are not used for books, but I got no other place for them at the moment. There are some old school magazines that I want to keep, a couple of boxes of comic books my brother and I used to collect, a box file of my old artwork, a bagful of unused notebooks, and some other junk.

In theory, there’s plenty of space for another 100 books or so, as long as I find a home for all the other non-books.

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FG Cottam - The House of Lost Souls
David Allen - Getting Things Done
Stephenie Meyer - The Host
Alice Hoffman - Here On Earth
ETA Hoffman & Roberto Innocenti - Nutcracker

The book haul as of end of this month. The last two books are from Book Castle, the rest are from stores that sell you books at full price. Unless you are a card-carrying member, which I am.

I’ve read The Host, which will be getting reviewed next week. I’m in the middle of The House of Lost Souls. I’ve given up on Special Topics in Calamity Physics, because books you work on every night for a month without getting anywhere near the end should be dumped. I don’t have the luxury of time.

Alice Hoffman is probably next. I have another lonely Hoffman book waiting to be paired up for a review. Hands up those of you who noticed that I have themes to my book column.

In any case, I’ve been trying to review one book per week lately. Some of the books are from authors or series I’ve been following, so I have geeky background knowledge that makes me look smart but only a few people can follow.

So, what are you reading?

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