I’m in the midst of re-organizing my entire book collection and I severely underestimated how much of a task this would be… I’m not sure how many I own at this point, but the problem is no longer storage, finally (we got two huge new bookcases to add to the original tall one). The problem is organization. What I realized during this multi-day, still-ongoing process is that it’s really damn tough to decide what defines a book in terms of genre. I realized this because I’m trying to divide them by genre (and then alphabetical by author within each section) but it’s difficult to assert what most defines a book to me. I’m not even into the fiction (by short story vs. novel section, or just all fiction together? Poetry, screenplays, plays, etc.) but in the non-fiction there are more academic yet creative books, or essay collections, there’s memoirs that aren’t really memoirs but thought experiments. There’s travel books, wine books, cooking books, writing how-to books, the list goes on and on and it’s gotten to the point where I think I’ll have to start with a low bar for myself and evolve the organization as I evolve alongside it, understanding myself and what the books mean to me as I go. Sounds boring, because it is, but I can tell it’s an important thought exercise for me to always do.
(this isn’t even all of them, and there’s another black Ikea bookcase to the left off screen)