Bookshelf tour

And a request for suggestions!

The big excitement in my life lately, amidst the horrors, is that I figured out a space in our small house for more bookshelves. Maybe it’s weird to have bookshelves in the front entryway, but how perfectly do these fit?

The classic IKEA Billy bookshelf

This, minus my TBR cart, is my book collection. I could have gotten away with one shelf, but I felt the space would look weird with just one shelf, and I love having room to expand.

I realized after I wrestled the IKEA boxes into the house and assembled the bookshelves that I had given no thought to how to organize the books themselves. Don’t tell the American Library Association - they might take away my degree! Organizing them ended up being very fun, but I suspect things will change as I use them more.

Top left: essays, a few handmade book boxes containing blank journals I made many years ago, 2025 Harper Olive editions (the theme was frequently challenged books)

Next shelf down, left: McNally editions. I am planning to eventually collect (and read!) the entire set so this will expand.

Big shelf, left: Reference! OED, the new Merriam-Webster, the Scrabble dictionary, Emily Post, Syme’s Letter Writer, the NRSV Bible that was the textbook for a really fun class I took my last semester of college, and a surprising number of Books of Common Prayer. Since taking this picture, I have added a thesaurus.

Fourth shelf down: books from my reading list from when I audited a semester of an MFA program¹, a few books related to ECT (possible project brewing), books about the craft of writing.

Second from the bottom, left: poetry on the left, memoirs on the right

Bottom left: classics, modern classics, and Penguin anthologies

Top right: TBD

Next shelf down, right: children’s/young adult

Big shelf: nonfiction

Bottom three shelves, right: general fiction, alphabetical by author’s surname

I am afraid, however, that all that empty space is making my already strong urge to buy books insatiable. My brain is still on winter break mode, when I had the freedom to read all day, but - alas! - capitalism has interfered with my ability to do that year-round. I should rein in the impulse.²

A request for suggestions!

One thing I am trying to do this year is fill in some gaps in my literary knowledge. I haven’t taken a survey literature course since high school (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) and, as a STEM major, I took only three English classes in college, including the one-semester English composition class. The other two I took were focused on particular topics. In short, one deficit I have (among many) has to do with classics. Lately I have been trying to read some - I jumped on the Wuthering Heights bandwagon³, then read Mrs. Dalloway (my first Woolf) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles⁴ and now I’m reading Vanity Fair, which is shaping up to be an absolute banger. I’m probably going to reread Jane Eyre (which I did read for school both in high school and college) and then something by Anne Brontë to complete the sisters. Dear readers, what else should I read? I seem to be focusing on the Brits at this point.

Also, an ironic thing is that while all these classics are readily available from the library in which I work, as well as the public library, I have found all of them I’ve done so far very marked up, which distracts me from the actual reading - so I’ve ended up buying the books! At least there is competition on the prices of classics.

An appreciation

I could not name a single Bad Bunny song and I don’t speak Spanish, but I fully enjoyed the Super Bowl halftime show and regret that I did not know about the opportunity to be cast as grass (though apparently you needed marching band experience for that). It was an infusion of hope and joy and the fact that it pissed some horrible people off is the icing on the cake.

1. A lot of illness narratives, some books on disability, a few novels that touch on mental health issues

2. HAHAHAHAHA!

3. WTF is going on with that new movie?

4. STEM major literary criticism: She sure gets blamed for a lot of stuff that isn’t her fault.