I let my bookshelves get out of hand. To the point where I have no room, have things in piles on top of piles on the shelves, and then eventually, I give up all together and have piles all over the floor. But after spending approximately all day yesterday (and a good chunk of the day before…and the day before…and the day before) perusing Unf*ck Your Habitat, I finally got the motivation to just tackle the shelves full force. It’s about this time of year every year I go through my I don’t want to become a hoarder stage and end up pitching half my house. I think this was a big first step.

Because I know I dig looking at other people’s shelves, I thought I’d give the grand tour, before and after style.

So these are the bulk of my office shelves, and they were arranged by color. The three wooden shelves were pretty good in terms of not being too messy. But then if you look to the wire shelves on the left, things weren’t quite as nice:

This is what happened after the Cybils, and I never bothered doing anything about it. I just kept shoving books in there. Then as I started finishing more recent books, I went ahead and made some nice piles on top of the shelves. Now, seeing this set of rickety shelves is beside the treadmill desk, it was only going to be a matter of time before I had a real disaster on my hands.

On the other side of my office (and mind you, my office is tiny – it’s probably 10 feet by 10 feet) is another book case. This one wasn’t so bad because it’s a lot smaller.

There was actually room on this set of shelves. Kinda.

The room next to my office is my bedroom and there is another small book case beside the bed. Also semi-empty, also not too bad.

I’m starting to kind of get embarrassed by how disorganized all of this was. Except that it only gets kind of worse from here on out. Before getting to my shame piles, let me take you to my living room book case, which is where I keep the more recent titles I’ve gotten and the things that are unread (the stuff in my office and bedroom is either stuff that I’ve read or stuff that’s not a review title and therefore less of a priority or it’s stuff that belongs to my husband because yeah, I let him put his books on my shelves).

Apparently, I’m showing off my incredible clutter habits in addition to my shelving habits. But anyway. This set of shelves isn’t too terrible. The top shelf, up on the left, houses books that either I need to review or are books that I’ve meant to review or do some further action on and the ones on the right are books on writing craft. I’ve also got my paper book lists (because yes, I hand write every single book I read down in those little notebooks on the middle shelf), my Cubby (if you’ve read Frost that will be a fun reference), and my husband’s junk box on the second-from-the-top shelf.

Okay. Now I give you two photos of shame. First, this is underneath the front window in my living room:

These are the most recent books I’ve received or at least that’s what I continued to claim they were. The truth is, most of them were ALA books I never bothered to put away (or didn’t have room for, as evidenced by the shelves). In addition to these shame piles, I have my committee book pile in the guest bedroom.

These are the Alex books coming in and causing me even more stress because I have no idea where to put them.

But alas, I learned today that not all is lost, and that I can take care of my own book shame. First, it took an incredible amount of purging. Between books I plan on giving away and books that were in crummy enough shape that recycling them made the most sense, I got rid of about six garbage bags and cleared a ton of room. It left me so much space I tinkered around a bit with my shelf organization, though by no means is there a true method here.

Starting back in the office:

This is my now usable set of wire shelves. It’s become where all my reference-type books have gone, along with the Norton Anthologies I cannot bring myself to throw away. As much as I hate them and as little as I use them (read: never), I can’t bring myself to get rid of them. I think it’s because I know I have some great stuff written in the margins and maybe someday I’ll want to remember what I was thinking about some piece of post-modern fiction (…I can dream). Also, as you’ll see, I’ve got my husband’s immense collection of Uncle John’s titles, coding books, style guides (because who doesn’t have an APA and an MLA guide sitting around), and my copy of ED Hirsch’s masterpiece on Cultural Literacy. Read that last part with a tinge of sarcasm and knowledge my copy is stuffed with glitter.

So the shelves to the right of the wire set have been completely reorganized, too.

Look at how straight the books are! And how much room there is! On the left set is adult books and poetry, the middle set of shelves is a mix of a few different things, and the right set are my ya books. Let’s look closer (because I know you’re interested in WHAT is residing on those shelves as much as the fact they’re now pretty to look at).

Grouped together on the top few shelves are my different-books-by-the-same-author, including Bill Bryson, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Ryu Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. After that, it’s just by size from left to right on the shelves until the very bottom shelf — that’s where I’ve stacked all my poetry books. This is a mix of fiction and non-fiction.

 

And here’s my ya fiction book case. There is no organizational scheme at all, except by size across the shelves. The bulk of these are ones I’ve read but there are a few that are still in the “I’ll read it some day” category. Honestly, the majority of my purging today was of old galleys that I knew I would never get to. The things that, if I really had the whim to read, I’d go pick it up at the library. I hate things taking up space in my house, and those were doing just that.

I want you to know we call the little monkey bank “Sunshine.”

So now that the office was tackled, I had the entire book case in my bedroom to use. I’d emptied it completely, adjusting everything to fit in the office. But before I went to fill the bedroom case, I weeded the book case in the living room, moving all the older galleys into the bedroom. And then I decided I should just rid myself of the Alex shame pile in the guest bedroom at the same time. So my bedroom shelves now look like this:

There is even room for more books as they come in. I’ve been warned this will certainly not be enough room, but as you can see, there is a small floor space to the left of the shelf, and that’s where I’ll be piling them up. At least that shame pile will be in my bedroom beside the book case, next to the rest of the same type of book.

And finally, I moved the books residing on the floor in my living room to my living room shelf. It is now a thing of true beauty and simplicity.

My top shelf, where I held all those “to complete action on” books is now down to two books I have to write reviews for, and the pile of books between those and my writing books are books that belong to my friend Andrea. I made so much room, in fact, the entire bottom shelf is empty.

There you have it — a tour of my book shelves and the entire process behind purging and shifting. Let me tell you how nice it feels to have gotten rid of so much stuff. I love books as much as any other reader, but I’m not really attached to the product when I finish reading. I don’t have a huge problem letting go of the physical copies, especially with the ease of being able to access them via my ereader if I want to (but I think I’ve mentioned before I kind of hate ereading…but the point is I CAN access books if I need/want to). More importantly, I no longer have shame piles in my house, and I foresee this being the case for quite a while.

I see weeding as a huge part of having a big reading life, and I think it’s important, too, as part of the process of reassessing one’s growth and development as a reader. Keeping old things around weigh us down and hold us back. At my first library job, my coworkers used to comment on my weeding because I was pretty ruthless about it, but my philosophy is that the more you weed and the more you get rid of the things that you don’t have some sort of attachment to, the more you find the things you’ve maybe missed out on and the more you can better define what it is you do love. Hokey but true. It also helps you from becoming a hoarder.