Reading in Reykjavík

I came across the following on the Guardian book website this morning, and felt I had to comment. Alphabetisation is the most banal approach to bookshelving going: who wants their living room to look like a lending library? Sarah, I don't really see what is banal about alphabetising your books. Everyone should use whatever system suits them best and not have to worry about being publicly criticised for it. The only problem I can see with straight alphabetising is that if you own a mixture of paperbacks, hardcovers and books in various larger formats and shapes (like I do), it's not an economical use of shelf space. But banal? No, just practical.

I recently compiled an Excel spreadsheet containing information about my TBR books so I could keep better track of how I am doing in the informal “reduce the TBR stack” challenge. I excluded reference books, craft books, cookbooks, travel guides and books one rarely if ever reads from cover to cover, and according to this reckoning I have, as of today, 789 TBR books in my book collection. I had not realised I owned so many books I had not read. Of the genres, about half are mysteries, thrillers or crime novels of one kind or another. The second biggest genre is novels of all sorts, including 81 historical non-mystery novels. This is followed by 55 romances and 49 travelogues and a smattering of other genres. Since I get rid of 9 out of every 10 books I own either through BookMooch or by donating them a local charity after I have read them, there is a lot of shelf space I can free just by reading more of my own books and fewer library books. When I have finished reading the current cro...

Link to part 1 .    How I organise my own library: I am not the kind of person who needs to have everything perfectly organised – just organised enough to be able to find things fairly quickly without having to refer to a catalogue or index, and my system reflects that. This is a system I arrived at after several moves which I used as opportunities to try out different arrangements, since I had to take the books down from the shelves anyway. Books I am reading are strewn all over the house, several in each room. Those I think I have been reading for too long and want to finish soon reside on top of the back of the living-room sofa. Another pile sits on one of the kitchen chairs, well out of splattering range of the stove but within an arm’s reach of the table. Cookbooks and food reference books belong in the kitchen. Food history, food travel books, essay and article collections and foodie memoirs, however, go with the rest of the history, travel and biography books u...

The photos below of the colour-organised bookshelves got me thinking about book organisation. I once got the task of organising a small school library. There were not a lot of books in it, probably about 1500 or so (certainly fewer than in my home library right now), but it was an eclectic collection of mostly reference books and novels, with some art and technical books in-between, all in no order at all, except fiction was kept in a different room so it wouldn’t get mixed up with the non-fiction. I decided right away that this was not a Dewey job and invented a coarse system that suited the library and the disorganised lending system. This was the lending system: you took whatever books you wanted and returned them to the shelves once you were finished with them. Or not. There were no cards, no lending list and no catalogue, and most of the students (adults, one and all) could not be trusted to remember from what shelf they took the book, basically just sticking the books back wher...