Writes Elin Hilderbrand, one of 9 writers at "How do you organize your books? 9 authors share their favorite shelves. Shelfies by Elin Hilderbrand, Diana Gabaldon, Garrett Graff, Vanessa Riley, Emma Straub, Hernan Diaz, Jennifer Weiner, Chris Bohjalian and Christopher Buckley" (WaPo).
"Shelfies" is a cute coinage for photographs of ones shelves.
Anyway, I was just thinking of rereading "Franny and Zooey," and this may put me over the edge, but I have one question. Why the second "x" on "Maxx"? I'm thinking of being influenced by you, Ms. Hilderbrand, but that's a teensy red flag. The only reference I can think of on my own is that crazy store T.J. Maxx.
Wait. I know enough to add a minus to "T.J." and search for "Maxx." Is it a reference to a purple comic-book hero who lives in the real world as a homeless man in a box and in an alternate reality where he protects somebody called the Jungle Queen? Or could it have to do with the German Eurodance project, which was called Maxx as a shortening of "Maximum Exstasy"?
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My books are arranged by topic. I have a shelf for Hemingway, another for Churchill, one for math books, several for medical books although I gave away most of my historic books when I moved to Arizona. They are all arranged by topic.
We are often stymied by the challenge of defining mutually exclusive/collectively exhaustive categories of our books, like the Chinese division of animals into those that are white, those that are imaginary, and those that belong to the Emperor.
I arrange my fiction shelves alphabetically by author, but my husband organizes his vast military history collection by campaign (and then alphabetically by author) -- eg Civil War East, Civil War West, etc.
I once had my nonfiction books sorted by topic. I was compelled to put mathematics next to ancient Greece so as to have a spot for Euclid.
Our living room shelves are "books with attractive bindings".
Our dining room shelves exclude books that would cause our dinner guests to stomp out.
I think the video wants us to Get A Way...not sure though, it was only repeated 10,475 times...
My great book wall is slowly being stored at the local library.
I organize mine as math, physics, cosmology, astronomy, image science, geology, nature, trail guides, science fiction, … Unimaginative, but functional. I also have a section of mainly physics books recently received from a mate who is downsizing.
"Maxx"?
No glory in e-books eh. Kindle should provide an app displaying one's terribly impressive books as a zoom background.
Damn they're easier to read tho.
My books are arrange by the limited space I've allotted to them. I've given cases of books away over the years, to public libraries in whatever town I was leaving. I've moved a lot over the years and while my books were always my treasure, at some point I came to realize that packing all of those boxes of books for yet another move seemed pointless. Especially because the odds of me rereading all of them were nil. The odds of rereading a few of them was a possibility, but who knew what would move me at what time?
So now I do regret having given up much of my collection. Now that I'm retired and have the time to read whatever I want, whenever I want. But there's still so much I want to get to, I don't typically look back and reread. I look forward to discovering new stories from writers new to me. Or new books from writers whom I love to read. But I do still fill up some good sized bookshelves and keep a couple of shelves fully lined with leather-backed versions of classics. Not for show. Just something I thought I'd leave to the grandkids when the time was right. (like...when I'm gone). Surely one of them might find it neat. I mean, what kid isn't buzzing in place to read Ulysses?
The rest of the books I've kept is such an amalgam of topics and writers, fiction and non, there's no rhyme or reason for any of it. Just a map of what hit me at particular times in my life. If you looked at my shelves you'd think my favorite author was Shakespeare, and that is not the case. My favorite authors are names that most people don't know.
by campaign (and then alphabetically by author) -- eg Civil War East, Civil War West, etc.
No Offense, but This is THE problem! (at least Was THE problem)
For far too long, the Union thought of the war like that- eg Civil War East, Civil War West, etc.
This is why they were losing (at least, NOT winning) for the first years.
Not only was there NO coordination between Halleck and McClellan; there was Damn little coordination between Halleck and Buell, or between McClellan and Pope
(or Grant and Banks, or HELL! between Banks, Frémont and McDowell).
Every Campaign was in it's own private Idaho, with NO thought of how it effected the others.
Once the Union FINALLY realized that it was ALL one war, they were unstoppable
The Rebels knew this from the beginning, and worked that way in the 1862 invasions of Maryland, Kentucky and Price's campaign on Corinth.. Which ALL happened simultaneously.. And ALMOST won them the war
My favourite is Amy Sedaris organizing books by spine color. Much as I dislike the poseurism of Hilderbrand, it does pleasantly remind me of John Cusack in High Fidelity.
https://youtu.be/AQvOnDlql5g
I like Elin Hilderbrand books as light summer reading. But the last book of hers I read, she had a character from Cincinnati and talked about how the topography of Cincinnati is flat and farmlandy. So flat, no hills. It bothered me. Is everyone outside the NY area inconsequential to Hilderbrand that she can't be bothered to know that Cincinnati is really hilly? Do her editors not even care enough that it's wrong? It's a tiny detail, but it said a lot to me. So I don't read her anymore. Her books are filed in a little bubble.
"But the last book of hers I read, she had a character from Cincinnati and talked about how the topography of Cincinnati is flat and farmlandy. So flat, no hills. It bothered me."
Every time I read about the Midwest, it seems, the writer wants to say it's flat. Wisconsin is flat? Why not look it up? There aren't mountains, but the terrain is rolling and hilly. It's human scale and quite pretty. We ought to fight back by pointing out how flat the East Coast is.
If you showed up to a fancy literati party (or a liberal-arts college classroom) and said that "Franny and Zooey" was your favorite book, you'd get laughed all the way back to Podunk. Not only is Salinger three-quarters canceled, his work is now considered practically kiddie-lit to urban sophisticates. (Meanwhile, Gen-Z types, who have Netflix but no longer read mid-century male fiction in high school, might wonder why someone named a book after the quirky actress from "New Girl.")
I shelve by topic and I was just going to get rid of "revolution" when the Ukraine war happened and I saw the Russian revolution books repurposing (relation of Ukraine to Russia and Soviet Union) and now the China revolution books are doing the same (How many Chinese are there? History of Japan). "Civil war" had similarly repurposed several years ago. I'm rearranging "Philosophy" to cover "Modern state and person." And I may be able later to get rid of some books from the shelves of the newly revised categories. Churchill, mysteries, Shakespeare and Nice Covers for the Living Room stay the same. The gaps I can see are: "Response of rising (China) and falling (Russia) empires in relation to decline of Communism and the birth winter." "The Decline of the New England Mind and the Rise of Mental Silly Walking in the US: Social and Military Consequences."
Everything is by topic, except for my paperback sci-fi/fantasy, which takes up one entire wall in my garage in PHX - with 10’ ceilings. I think that it is 14-15 16’ long shelves. Professional books (law and math/engineering) are in two 3’x7’ bookcases (one each) in my office. Law books are partly sorted by size. Technical books start with some science, followed by a bunch of math, then some mechanical engineering, basic EE, followed by Circuits, processors, and computer systems and architectures. The bottom half or so is CS of some type, starting with Operating Systems, and after awhile Programming Languages, starting genetically, then specific, with some historicality (thus C before C++ and C##, Algol before Pascal and Ada, etc). Stuff like HTML, that doesn’t fit in nicely goes last. Most of the rest is in two similar bookcases in the den.
Organizing by date read just seems silly.
With art books I organize by artist, with fiction and non-fiction books I organize by author. This does not mean the subsets of authors are in alphabetical order relative to each other. I group all books by the same author into one section, but the books adjacent to a grouping of books by one author can be completely unrelated alphabetically or otherwise. Some books I group by general or specific topic.
The other crucial organizing metric is what books fit on which shelves, (due to the varying heights of books, especially art books). And, a good number of my books are shelved randomly, which means I sometimes have to hunt for a book I'm looking for.
"No glory in e-books eh. Kindle should provide an app displaying one's terribly impressive books as a zoom background.
"Damn they're easier to read tho."
They're more convenient,perhaps, more portable, but not easier to read, at least not for me. I like to have a sense of where I am in the book, indicated by where my bookmark is placed when I close or open the book. Am I in the beginning, middle, or coming to the end? With eBooks, I feel lost in an boundless ocean of text, with no sense of where I am or how long it may take to finish the book. This bothers me. Also, I tend to fetishize books as physical objects. I enjoy just picking up, holding and skimming through books from my shelves, and then putting them away. Heck, I enjoy just looking at the books on the shelves.
I’ve lived in a flat Midwestern locale (outside Detroit) and a hilly one (the snow country east of Cleveland). Also travelled a lot there, like last month driving through super flat eastern North Dakota ( which was scenic in its own way). It’s the diversity (and inclusion)!
A few days ago, I watched the 2020 movie My Salinger Year, based on a 2014 book of the same name, written by novelist Joanna Rakoff.
I enjoyed this movie very much, especially since it starred the adorable young actress Margaret Qualley, the daughter of the likewise adorable older actress Andie MacDowell.
Anyway, the movie portrays Rakoff's real-life experience of working for the Harold Ober literary agency in 1996, when she was 23 years old. One of her duties there was to manage the huge amount of mail that the agency, which represented J.D. Salinger, from his fans.
Those fans expected the agency to forward their letters to Salinger, but instead the agency just took a few notes about the letters and then shredded all of them. The agency did this, because Salinger himself did not want to receive any of those letters.
Without permission, Rakoff began to write back to some of those fans. She did not pretend to be Salinger, but she wrote her own advice to the fans. For her well-intentioned efforts, she eventually got into a lot of trouble with the fans and with her agency. Her situation, as depicted in the movie, is quite amusing.
Anyway, many of those fans wrote in their letters that they liked his novel Fanny and Zooey the most -- much more than Catcher in the Rye. I never read Franny and Zooey, but now I think that maybe I should read it.
I read Franny and Zooey for the first time as a college freshman, then again probably once a month (always in a single sitting) for years. In all, I've read it nearly 200 times.
I even married a Franny.
There’s no excuse for inaccurately describing a location anymore given that we have the Internet. You can literally look up a street address and get a picture of the building, and the neighborhood. Lazy authors are bad authors, usually.
Books:
Categories:
Fiction plus literary nonfiction, philosophy, social science: alpha by author.
History, each category (USA, Britain, Military, US Military, China, India, France, Germany, Ancient and Medieval, Business, a few smaller categories) chronological
Reference and books on writing and odds and ends, roughly by category,
Oversized, roughly by category, art books chronological
The system breaks down as books exceed shelvage, a perennial crisis.
"I once had my nonfiction books sorted by topic. I was compelled to put mathematics next to ancient Greece so as to have a spot for Euclid."
Books that belong in more than one place can be a problem.
Another faucet of Narcissism personal hygiene disodor. I just Marie Kondo'd my book shelves. You don't need to reread much, the kids don't want your old stuff, Goodwill bargain hunters will appreciate the gifts.
Kindle has a user friendly folder system that lets me do this. I have folders for each year’s completed books, to be read books, fiction, nonfiction and a few other categories that make sense for me. Any book can be on multiple “shelves”.
Kindle has a user friendly folder system that lets me do this. I have folders for each year’s completed books, to be read books, fiction, nonfiction and a few other categories that make sense for me. Any book can be on multiple “shelves”.
I think most people who "organize" their books do so for the effect they hope it will have on other people whom they invite over. I'm 69 years old, and my hundreds and hundreds of books I've collected over a lifetime are totally unorganized, but I know how to find the one I'm looking for in just a minute.
@gilbar
My husband says your strategic point is correct but his cataloguing point is correct.
My own goal which I finally had to relinquish was put the book by Wiley Sword ("Bloody April") next to the bookend in the form of a sword.
My books are organized topically in a system I created. When we moved from IL to KY 16 months ago I gave away perhaps 500 books to Goodwill. I think most probably ended up being recycled. I have maybe 1700 on my shelves and another 400 still in boxes.
“ In all, I've read it nearly 200 times.”
Wow. What was it about this book that made it so important to you?
There are anchor sections, like a couple shelves of Derrida or of Coleridge (Bollingen series) or Levinas or Wittgenstein, that attract related books by other authors; and a poetry or rhetoric section by various authors. Then stacked on top, after all the bookcases were long filled, a simple time ordering of books gotten afterwards.
I never finished Franny and Zooey. Once you put it down it's hard to pick up again.
I know I'm a cynic, but I think most people who save a thousand books or more, and organize them, do so for show. It's like "Look at all the books I own! I am so educated!" Sometimes when I am invited to their house for a party or get together, I start asking them about particular books, and it seems like they have never read the ones I ask them about. The ones they have read they have forgotten about, and the ones they haven't read will probably never be read. But it sure makes for an impressive backdrop! Sort of like the lawyer in a commercial ad who stands in front of a bookcase of hundreds of law books, which contain thousands if not millions of written decisions by federal and state courts, almost all of which have never been read by the lawyer. I know, because I was a lawyer before I retired.
I've whittled my book collection down to under 100 books. Loosely organized in 2 categories, history and sci-fi. The 1941 version of "The Lily Wallace New American Cook Book" is in the history section. Someday I may need a recipe for Calf's Head or Brains A La King.
Currently rereading a 1962 volume of "Amazing Fact and Science Fiction Stories." I love the ads on the last page. From the Personals, as written by Star.
3 Questions Answered $1.00. Send Birthdates with large, Stamped, Selfaddressed envelope.
Star, 153 Camellia, San Antonio 9, Texas.
Back when they had 1 digit zip codes.
I get the uneasy feeling that all these oh-so-precious geeks put this much thought into their goddamn bookshelves because they secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) hoped that one day there would be a story in the WaPo or (better yet) the NYT on how precious geeks arrange their goddamn book shelves.
And even less charitable scenario is that the editor cooked up the "story" "idea" (quotes, because neither is not much of either), then sent out feelers to various agents who subsequently told their clients to re-arrange their shelves in a quirky, endearing and precious manner so as to be eligible get some ink.
"No glory in e-books eh. … Damn they're easier to read tho."
Not for technical/textbooks. Usability is atrocious in the electronic format.
By Topic and then author. Like someone up thread, I've started to wonder how many I can reread given the time left. 25 years seems like a long time. but if you read 50 books a year, that's just 1,250 books. But then when I want to give some of the books to the local library, its like giving away one of my pets. Nope.
However, I've resolved to drastically cut down any NEW books.
Salinger seems to be a minority taste, but those who like him, REALLY like him.
I was recently regaled with the horrible reality that there are people on this earth who will buy book sets off of Amazon ("real books") to put into their decorating schemes. Not because these books are good (and in some of the examples they were excellent books), but because the color and size met some esthetic requirement.
The truly horrible and related tale was that there are people who shelve their books with spine toward the wall so they have a "library-ish" effect but in neutral colors.
MayBee said...
8/2/22, 11:02 AM
I've never read this author (and now never will); she's too lazy to spend a few minutes on the net before she locates a character in a city that she's obviously never visited? And I thought that book publishers had "fact checkers" to avoid this kind of error?
I thought I recalled from some time long ago that Cincinnati was surrounded by hills.
It took me 30 seconds to find this bit about the 7 hills of Cincinnati (or is it 10)?
http://www.diggingcincinnati.com/2014/03/cincinnati-city-of-seven-hills.html
==> this remined me that John McPhee has an amusing (and informative) essay in his collection titled "Draft No. 4" in which he describes his dealings with fact checkers for various magazines for which he wrote.
Look upon my works, ye mighty!
Little books on top, big books on the bottom.
"I was recently regaled with the horrible reality that there are people on this earth who will buy book sets off of Amazon ('real books') to put into their decorating schemes. Not because these books are good (and in some of the examples they were excellent books), but because the color and size met some esthetic requirement."
I met a guy like that -- his name was Jay Gatsby. A little full of himself, but he gave great parties.
I don't try to impress people with my library. I just tell them I was a librarian.
My wife and I have a fine old '20s glass-fronted bookcase (NOT a horrid lawyer's bookcase) in the living room, which is the only room most of our visitors will ever see. If someone was to take the time to look at them, they'd find an eclectic mix of fiction, history, biography, travel, and art books, and if that someone wanted to impress ME they would ask about my handy volume set of the 11th edition Britannica, kept low and in the shadow.
There's a hodgepodge of paperback fiction, cookery books, and some big glossy pop-sci items on the built ins in our den (which is more gym and lumber room than den). My wife has a shelf unit full of textile and design books in the office, along with more hodgepodge.
But no one would know me very well if they didn't visit my game room-library, and see the mostly military history collection, going back to the first few hardbacks I bought with my own money as a kid. (Wargames on utility shelves in the closet, boxed, flat.)
Except for the reference shelf, it's mostly in chrono order. My atlases I store flat on a work table.
At any given time a small pile of current reading will follow me around--two or three books at once.
After years of things being mish-mashed together I did seperate things as much as I could such as mysteries, fiction, history, biography, and so forth. Makes it easier to find things.
Yes, I worked in the high school library and was noted as being a good worker except when he stop reshelving books to read one.
I haven't organized my books since my last move 9 years ago. They are helter skelter though all the cook books are on one shelf. Before my move, I took all the books readily available for Kindle to the Salvation Army. This left a lot of mid-century li fi, science fiction and mystery. I have several sets of encyclopedias - the 1911 (1922 edition) and an Americana from 1964 -before rampant political correctness plus a variety of 19th century compendiums so I can look to see what people thought about vaccination in 1850. Our general practice as a couple is to give it away once we have both read it unless it falls into the small group we might want to re-read. Somehow there are still more than a dozen stuffed shelves. I've thought about repeating my pre-move purge now that so much li fi, mystery and sci fi from the 20's to the 90's is turning up on Kindle.
I organize my books in a large attractive bulding in town where a large attractive staff works full time organizing them in something called the Dewey decimal system which enables me to keep my shelves at home full of interesting and useful objects.
We ought to fight back by pointing out how flat the East Coast is.
Already been done by The Beach Boys.
I read Franny & Zooey when I was young, and didn't understand it at all.
If you are interested in understanding Franny & Zooey from a religious perspective (which seems to be what Salinger was aiming at), I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Silent-Land-Christian-Contemplation-ebook/dp/B003TWNDXW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=487NRHOPP79T&keywords=into+the+silent+land+martin+laird&qid=1659526668&sprefix=into+the+silent+la%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-1
“Franny and Zooey”? I read it in high school after being blown away by “Catcher in the Rye.” It was like, “Did the same guy write this book?” All I remember was them in a taxi in NYC arguing about something … I think. At any rate, Catcher was influential on me … too influential. It allowed me permission to be the hyper-critic asshole I was just discovering within myself. Everyone became a phony. Tbh, I didn’t really get the book at the time, at least not him ending in a psyche ward or wherever he was recalling things from. But it captured a type of youth, semi-alienated, idealistic, highly judgemental. Me, IOW.
Am I the only one here who has trouble finishing books these internet days? Started “Demons” by Dostoyevsky recently, got 200 pages deep then thought, “Does anything ever happen in this book?” Same thing with “Infinite Jest.” I even tried a James Peterson novel to see is bubblegum was easier to finish. Nope.
I feel absolutely no obligatory finish a book I’ve started but I would like to think I still can.
I got rid of all my books except for maybe a couple dozen that I keep for whatever reason -- I wrote it(!) or I read it regularly or for reference -- but otherwise, I'm one-and-done reading. Now I'm all about Kindle or iBook.
I go to estate sales a lot and people have hundreds of books and you just know most of them haven't been touched in years.
I can never think about personal libraries without thinking about Jay Gatsby and his purchase of thousands of books to put on a show in his house library in order to attract the insipid, empty headed Daisy.
At one of the parties described in the novel,, a character named Owl Eyes stumbled drunkenly into Gatsby's library and pulled a book from the shelf. He then with great astonishment told the narrator Nick (and I don't' remember the exact quote) but something along the lines of "All of these books and none of the pages have been cut."
I used to have to explain to my students that books used to come sealed, and in order to read it, you have to cut the pages.
LOL -- Gatsby.
I used to finish all books I started, but I joined the millennials with DNF. I am too old to suffer through some of the current publishing with its agendas and pushing books to the fore-front just because they check off some kind of political or social box. Egads. I checked out seven books from the library recently and five of them were "unreadable."
Some house builders used to offer impressive-looking but very shoddy editions of the classics by the shelf-full as an option--there when you moved in. Alternatively you could buy a cheap set of "Harvard Classics" like my Opa did and pretend to be educated.
Adler's Great Books adorned many a shelf when I was growing up, but they seemed to be seldom read.
Jennifer Weiner's a shrill anti-female-Christian racist and Christopher Buckley's a second generation ass.
I imagine in both cases the books were arranged by nasty personality. I prefer LoC.
I have not heard of any of these writers mentioned in the article. Does that fact say more about me or about them?
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