Book Bonanza

Despite the fact that I have always loved to read, I didn't read very much from 2009 to 2016. This was for a variety of reasons, ranging from post-college fatigue to a soul sucking job to CPA exam stress to being a ball of anxiety, but it resulted in my bookshelves remaining pretty static and fairly sparse. In the last couple of years, though, as I have started reading voraciously again (and oh my, what a joy it is!), my shelves have exploded. This has required me to frequently reorganize my books, as I don’t have room in my current living space for another full bookshelf.

My bookshelves - including my book collection, obviously - are now one of my favorite things in my apartment. (I have been known to sit and stare at my books for extended periods of time just because they make me happy.)

My books are kept in six main subgroups (listed in the order they are considered when categorizing a book): unread, Harry Potter, children’s books, graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction. My fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books are organized by author, while my graphic novels are by title (to keep series together when the authors change).

I recently added an unread shelf. I used to keep books I hadn’t read yet in a pile under a side table, which made it difficult to see what was there and to pick out my next read. I repurposed a small shelf that was being used mostly for decor and I am loving having a visible and neat place to keep the books I am going to read in the future! It’s even further encouraged my reading habits, as I can easily see the books I have to look forward to when I finish the one I am currently reading.

Yes, I do have an entire shelf dedicated to Harry Potter. I don’t think anything else needs to be said about that.

Children’s books is a complicated category for me and I recently revisited how I define this category. Where is the line between children’s literature and a book I would read as an adult? I even took a Children’s Literature course in college, so some of those books feel like “older” reads because of when I read them, even though they were written for kids. For now, I have settled on books that could be read by kids younger than ten should be separated out into this category. I’m still not sure I’ve stuck to that line with how my books are categorized, though. Who knows what ten year olds read? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Graphic Novels is a new category for me, as I have only recently started reading them. I expect it to grow quickly, though, as I have already gotten invested in several series and am looking for more. I keep all of my graphic novels together, regardless of whether they are fiction or nonfiction. As my collection expands, I may need to revisit that decision, but for now it is what makes the most sense.

Within my fiction category, I separate out book series from the rest of my fiction. I do this mostly for aesthetic reasons. There’s something I enjoy about seeing the variety of covers as I scan over my fiction collection. For understandable reasons, books in a series usually have matching spines which would disrupt the visual effect I enjoy so much, so I keep my fiction series separate from the rest of my fiction.

Another tricky decision is how to subdivide the nonfiction category. I used to break out biographies and autobiographies from other nonfiction, but there has become so much crossover in the types of nonfiction books I read that it became increasingly difficult to decide which subcategory each book belonged in. Therefore, I now only have history broken out as a subcategory, but that also has some crossover problems, so that may end up getting folded back into the larger category at some point.

I also have been getting two magazines since 2005 and 2009, respectively. I love these magazines and I have kept every issue I’ve received. Do you want to know how many times I’ve looked back at old issues, though? Maybe once - and it was for something I probably could have found online. When I was a kid, my parents would save magazines because we would use them for art or school projects. However, not only do I not have kids (or expect to have them in the near future), but also the internet exists now. At this point, each of my two subscriptions took up a whole shelf of my rapidly dwindling space for books (plus when I eventually move they would be a pain (both literally and figuratively)). In order to please both my practical and nostalgic sides, I decided to keep one or two issues of each magazine from each year I have had the subscription. In the process, I created about a shelf and a half of extra shelf space for future use!

How do you like to organize your books? Do you categorize by subject? Author? Color?