Bookshelf Organizing: A Challenge for Both the Mind and the Body

  

As you can probably see from this picture, I'm still in the process of cleaning up some of the mess I made on Saturday while reorganizing approximately 1,000 books that are shelved in my home office. But overall, especially now that my knees are feeling a bit better after two days of resting them, I am pretty pleased with the result. I can't believe how much easier it is now to find any specific book that I might be searching for than it was before I moved almost every single book shown here to a new spot on the shelves.

I still have some fine-tuning to do with the few books still on the floor, but I have also marked about 30 books to be given to friends in a few days and discovered more than a few hidden gems I'd forgotten all about.

Prior to this re-do, my books were mostly sorted alphabetically according to author surname. I also had that center section dedicated to older editions, classic literature, and all those Library of America books in the center of the middle section, along with another couple of shelves for signed copies and other more valuable first edition copies of some of my favorite books. But the main problem was that many of my favorite writers didn't limit themselves to novels. They also wrote short stories, novellas, essays, memoirs, literary criticism, and the like - genres that seemed to disappear into some kind of black hole when I went looking for a specific type of reading experience. 

So I decided to chuck the surname method in favor of dedicating separate sections of the shelves to:

• Short Stories
• Memoirs, Essays, and Criticism
• Westerns
• Biographies
• Historical Fiction
• Road Trips and Long Walks
• History
• Science Fiction
• Signed Copies / More Valuable Editions
• Favorite Series
• Spy Fiction
• LOA Books, Modern American Books, and Other Favorite Editions of "Literature"

Within these genres, the books are still sorted by author surname or, in the case of biographies, by surname of the subject of the biography.

This is what it looked like as I first began to shift the shelves into standalone stacks while I tried to do some shelf-cleaning at the same time. All was going well until a couple of hours later when one of the stacks tilted over into another stack and the domino-effect resulted in books all over the floor in one big heap - to be resorted all over again. 

I still have another wall and some smaller bookshelves in other rooms to sort through, so this is still very much a work-in-progress, but I'm already happy with the results. I'm particularly excited to find that I have so many short story collections, for instance. Until I saw all of them in one section, I never realized how many stories I still haven't explored or even sampled. Even a substantial portion of the LOA books are short story compilations, but those are going to be kept with the other LOA books. I think this effort is going to impact my TBR list for years to come because I only realize now what a goldmine I've been sitting next to for all these years. (I've also culled some junk from the shelves - books that are going to be donated.)

How do you guys organize your own shelves? Traditionally, randomly, by genre - or  by some combination of all of this? I'd love to hear if you have something better that works for you.

My Reading Reached an Unexpected Milestone the Other Day

My reading reached a milestone one day last week that I never expected to attain. And it all started with a book list I've somehow managed to maintain since February 18, 1970, a list that started out as simply one to record the title, author and date read for every book I complete. 

When it all started, I was 21 years old and about to get married, so I must have been thinking about all the milestones ahead of us in the coming decades, and it must have seemed like a good idea to begin a list like this one. I never, though, dreamed that I would still be doing this more than 54 years later or that the list would ever approach something like 4,000 titles. I remember thinking how great it would be to look back and see that I'd read one or two thousand books in my life. At the pace I was reading back then, what with all the demands life was making on us at the time, I didn't see the odds of hitting even those numbers as being very much in my favor. 

But last week, Megan Nolan's Ordinary Human Failings, a novel I really enjoyed, became book number 4,000 on the list. And I still find that number hard to believe considering my original goals.

Below is a post I made back in 2017 about a book that rekindled my enthusiasm about maintaining the list for as long as I possibly can. Pamela Paul is a true kindred spirit for me, and what she's done with her own list is pretty remarkable. Makes me want to go back and read My Life with Bob all over again.

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It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a great while a book comes along that seems to have been written just for you.  It may be a book about some obscure hobby of yours that you figured no one else in the world cared about, or about some equally obscure figure from the past you imagined no one remembered (much less actually cared about) but you.  And in the unlikeliest of all cases, it might be a book - imagine it now, a whole book - about some weird habit of yours that you seldom speak of in public.  It is exactly that last possibility that happened to me with Pamela Paul’s My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.  Who knew there was another person in the world maintaining a decades-old list of every book they ever read?

Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, began keeping her Book of Books (the “Bob” referenced in this memoir’s title) in 1988 when she was just a high school junior.  (As a point of reference, I began my own “Bob” in 1970, a few months before I turned twenty-two.)  Paul describes Bob as “factory-made, gray and plain, with a charcoal binding and white unlined paper, an inelegant relic from the days before bookstores stocked Moleskine notebooks,” exactly the kind of non-descript little book, I suspect, guaranteed to remain forever safe from the prying eyes of outsiders. 

In twenty-two chapters, each chapter carrying the title of one of the books listed in Bob, Paul exhibits just how precisely she is able to reconstruct segments of her past by studying Bob’s pages.  Each of the books chosen for chapters of their own remind the author of where she was both “psychologically and geographically” when she first read them.  By studying the list to see which books she read before and after the highlighted title, Paul can easily see whether the earlier books put her in the mood for more of the same or pushed her toward reading something very different.  Too, if her reading choices moved in a new direction, she can quickly determine how long that new interest or trend lasted.  And she confirmed something concerning one’s memory about which most avid readers will readily agree: Keeping a list of fiction read does very little to solidify the recall of characters or plot details – what it does do is provide a better understanding of changes in one’s own “character.”

Pamela Paul

My Life with Bob is an intimate look into the life of a woman who has made books and reading the central core of her life.  She has had many roles during her life:  student, daughter, wife, mother, etc., but I suspect that she takes equal joy in knowing that reader is an essential term others would use to describe who she is – and always has been. 

Readers are a curious lot, and one of the things we are most curious about is what others are reading.  We cannot resist browsing the bookshelves of those whose homes we visit, often altering our opinions (either upwardly or downwardly) about those being visited according to what we see on their shelves.  We find ourselves straining to read the titles of books on shelves sitting behind pictures of celebrities and politicians because we know that people are more likely to reveal their true nature and level of curiosity by what they choose to display on their private bookshelves than by what comes out of their mouths.  We can’t help ourselves; that’s the way we are.

If you are one of those people, you are going to love My Life with Bob because Pamela Paul is a kindred spirit who gets it.

Val McDermid Says the World's Leaders Should Read More Fiction - For Our Sake

 

I have long been of the opinion that readers of novels and other fiction are more empathetic and understanding than people who read only a steady diet of nonfiction, or don't bother to read anything at all other than their local sports page. And I think that's especially true for readers who started reading fiction from a young age.

Well, as this piece from The Guardian points out, author Val McDermid agrees - and takes it a big step or two further:

The most impressive political leaders during the coronavirus crisis have one thing in common, one of Britain’s most popular novelists believes: they all read fiction.

By contrast, the leader of one of the most “shambolic” responses is reading endless biographies of men who have gone before him, the “queen of crime”, Val McDermid, lamented at the Edinburgh international book festival.

[...]

Governments that seem to have done best “are led by people who read fiction” she said, naming Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Iceland and Sanna Marin in Finland among them.

“They are all people who read fiction. What fiction gives you is the gift of imagination and the gift of empathy. You see a life outside your own bubble. If you’re sitting there reading your endless biographies of Churchill or Attlee or whatever, you’re not looking at the world outside your window. You’re not understanding the lives of ordinary people who populate the country you’re supposed to be governing.

“My advice to any politician is: go and read a novel and you’ll understand the world better and you can imagine a changed world better.”

I don't pay all that much attention to an author's political views - unless they promote them in their fiction - because I don't want to let my personal feelings interfere with my enjoyment of their work. (But in total honestly, there are two or three authors I cannot read with any pleasure anymore because they make their politics so simplistically obvious in their work.) I don't always agree with the outspoken McDermid's personal views, and I much appreciate her for not saturating her novels with them. I love her work...and I think here she has paid a great compliment to fiction readers around the world. Do you agree with Val?

Do, please, click on the link to The Guardian for the rest of the story. 

Book Lovers Day

 

Happy Book Lovers Day, everybody!

I never knew that we had our own day before stumbling upon something about this special day about ten minutes ago. I've done a minimum of digging, but I have to admit that I'm still a little confused about what it is all about, really. From what I've seen, book lovers are supposed to sit around in comfortable places all day long and read a lot of pages from the books they love. 

Sort of like what I've been doing every day since mid-March when COVID-19 became the single most dominating thing in my life? Well, OK then, that's exactly what I'll do today.

And, as usual, no one knows what the accepted spelling of the day is. In five minutes of browsing, I've seen:

• Book Lovers Day
• Book Lovers' Day, and 
• Book Lover's Day.

You decide. Personally, I'm going with Book Lovers Day, since it's all about book lovers like us. Have a great day,  my fellow book lovers. 

Saul Bellow's Dangling Man Would Understand Just How We Feel

At a time when many of us, especially the older and necessarily more cautious of us, have come to realize that the surest way to keep ourselves safe from Covid-19 infection is to venture from home as little as possible, it is still difficult not to grow bored by the whole process. Four months of this level of isolation, be it self-imposed or government-mandated, is starting to leave its mark on all of us. What remains to be seen is whether that mark will be indelible or erasable.

That's why I had to chuckle to myself a bit this afternoon when I read this passage from Saul Bellow's 1944 novel, Dangling Man. These are the thoughts of the novel's main character, a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown because his whole life has been placed on hold while he waits to be drafted into the military during World War II: 

        "But what such a life as this incurs is the derangement of days, the leveling of occasions. I can't answer for Iva, but for me it is certainly true that days have lost their distinctiveness. There were formerly baking days, washing days, days that began events and days that ended them. But now they are undistinguished, all equal, and it is difficult to tell Tuesday from Saturday. When I neglect to look carefully at the newspaper I do not know what day it is. If I guess Friday and then learn it is actually Thursday, I do not experience any great pleasure in having won twenty-four hours."

Those last two sentences are particularly true. If I mistake a Friday for a Saturday, I can't get excited at all when I realize that Saturday is still to come, that it's not already half over. After all, there is no difference anymore between a weekday and a weekend day. Nothing is open and there's no place to go because, at least for the moment, I have all the groceries and medicine I need.

I find it rather serendipitous when I stumble on connections like this one between June 2020 and a novel written 76 years ago. It's a reminder that books are treasure chests - and that you don't know what's in them until you open them up. Pity the poor non-readers out there.

Some Bookstores Are Delivering "Mystery Bags" of Books to Customers

While independent bookstores all over the world are struggling to stay solvent, the good news is that a lot of them are figuring out ways to generate at least a little cash flow while their doors are still locked tight. 

According to this Smithsonian Magazine article, some are delivering "mystery bags" of books to customers yearning to experience the surprise of going to a bookstore and coming home with something totally unexpected. Since they can't browse the shelves for themselves, they ask the bookseller to do it for them.

"Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C. began offering the service in mid-March at a customer’s request.

“Favorite email of the day so far: ‘If I give you guys $100 can you send me a mystery bag of books?’” the bookstore tweeted on March 21.

“Yes. Yes we can.”

By the next day, more than 50 people had contacted the store with similar orders, according to Mary Tyler March of WAMU. Prior to the mystery bag suggestion, Capitol Hill Books had essentially closed its doors, limiting opening hours to 60-minute slots in which four people at a time were allowed to wander the store’s narrow, book-lined aisles."

Bookstores in other states have followed suit, and at least one of them says that it is delivering about 125 mystery bags per week. From the sound of it, the booksellers are having as much fun with this concept as the shoppers, so this is one of those win-win situations for a whole lot of bookish people.

Click on the link up above for the entire article. It might make you smile a little today.

Book Lover Callum Manning 1, Bullies 0

Callum Manning, Book Lover Supreme

I have a very neglected Instagram account that I'm tempted to resurrect just so that I can follow a young British teen by the name of Callum Manning. 

It seems that Callum has been catching all kind of grief from an obnoxious bunch of students from his new school in South Shields, England. Why? Simply because the boy is an avid reader and he decided to share his love of books on the internet - exactly the way that book bloggers all over the world have been doing for the last fifteen years or so. Callum's detractors/ridiculers took it so far as to set up a special group for the sole purpose of laughing at his bookish behavior, and then had the gall to make Callum a member of the group so that he could read all of their ignorant comments. 

Thus is life for a male teenager who enjoys reading. Not much has changed since I was that age (except that we did not have to meet our bullies on the internet), and I well remember that as a young reader myself, I had two choices: go public and accept the bullying and ostracism from my male peers or stay in the reading closet. I'm ashamed to admit that unlike Callum I chose the latter course. 

The BBC has the whole story here. The good news is that after Callum's older sister tweeted about the bullying he was suffering, the young man began to receive tremendous support from all over the world. He went from less than 40 followers to more than 85,000 and he's loving it. And it's all thanks to an ignorant bunch of bullies who wanted nothing more than to make his life miserable. Even my local NBC television affiliate is featuring the story on its website today.

The best revenge is to live well, Callum, and the best laugh is the last one. Congratulations.


Cal's twitter account: @_cal_123321

Cal's Instagram account: cals_book_account

More Than One-in-Four People in the U.S. Have Not Read a Book in the Past Year

At first glance, I found the numbers shown in this recent Pew Research Center study to be both astounding and terribly sad. But then it hit me. How many people in this country, I wondered, simply cannot read at all. What I found helped explained why 27% of the people in the U.S. have not read even one book in the past year, but it made me feel even worse about the state this country is in. 

As indicated on the graph shown above, 32% of men and 22% of women have not read a single book in the past twelve months. The percentage of non-readers is further broken down by race, education, and geographic location but there are no real surprises there. For instance, 22% of Whites are nonreaders, and the same can be said for 33% of Blacks and 40% of Hispanics. And the more schooling a person has, the more likely it is that they are a reader - as I would have expected. A little more surprising is that there is such a large gap between residents of urban/suburban areas and rural areas. But even that is at least partially explained by the relative difference between the two areas when it comes to access to educational opportunities and availability of reading material.

No, the real shocker is that 14% of this country's residents are illiterate and couldn't read a book even if they wanted to read one. Just take a look at this eye-opening statement provided by the Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy:

1. 32 million adults can not read in the United States equal to 14% of the population.
2. 21% of US adults read below the 5th grade level.
3. 19% of high school graduates can not read.
4. 85% of juveniles who interact with the juvenile court system are considered functionally illiterate.
5. 70% of inmates in America’s prisons can not read above the fourth grade level.

If that doesn't scare you, nothing will. Illiteracy is the cause of so many of the world's worst problems, including poverty and crime. It shouldn't be this hard to fix the problem - should it?

Silent Book Clubs

It tuns out that the new thing among avid Canadian readers is something called a Silent Book Club – although some have taken to calling them Book Clubs for Introverts.  So how does a silent book club differ from a traditional book club?  As it turns out, in a whole bunch of ways. 

It will probably not surprise any of you to learn that I have never been a member of a formal book club because very few men ever have, really. The main reason that men are not generally book club members is that there are relatively few of us in the first place.  And because male readers are generally unlikely to talk out loud about their reading amongst their peers, most of us don’t know enough interested male readers to form a book club even if we wanted to.  

Of course, a man can always join a book club that would otherwise be one hundred percent female, but for a number of reasons that is not as easy (or as wise) to do as it as first sounds.  Women tell me that having a male join their book club would negatively impact the discussions they have at the meetings, that the women would lose their sense of privacy and the feeling that anything and everything can be discussed within the confines of the group.  They say, too, that having even one man in the group would result in them having to read books they have no interest in and trying to make sure that their agreed upon selections do not look silly to their token male.  And I, as the lone male in the group, would most likely find myself often reading from genres that do not appeal to me and feeling guilty about forcing my own selection onto a less than enthusiastic group. It’s not a promising experience for either gender.

But Silent Book Clubs are a different thing altogether. They work this way:

Once or twice a month, members grab whatever they are currently reading and head to a local coffee shop or bar at a set time.  The meetings, which generally last between ninety minutes and two hours, begin with twenty or thirty minutes of having each member describe what he/she is currently reading and what they’ve been reading since everyone last met.  Next comes one hour of reading during which all members agree beforehand there will be no talking whatsoever.  About five minutes prior to the end of the hour, a designated member gives a five-minute -warning so that everyone can finish up at about the same time. Then it’s up to the individual members as to whether they stay around for more book discussion and socializing.  Some stay, some leave. And that’s it; simple as that.

Other than allowing me to finally become a book club member, there are lots of advantages to this type of club:  

·      There is no pressure to read something just because the rest of the group wants to read it.

·      Members will not be intimidated into keeping their opinions to themselves by more dominant or better-spoken members of the group.

·      There are no deadlines to meet.

·      No preparation is required – just grab what you are already reading and go.

·      Read whatever you want to read, no matter the genre or subject matter.

·      Support a local business or two without having to take a turn hosting (and all that entails) a book club meeting in your home.

·      Learn about what others are reading, what is popular and trending, and what new books are coming soon.  Discover books and authors that would have otherwise been missed or overlooked.

·      Force one solid hour of uninterrupted reading into your busy schedule, an hour away from all of life’s distractions.

The meeting guidelines I’ve described were taken from Vicki Ziegler’s interview on the CBCbooks.ca website. That website includes a five-minute audio file from CBC Radio in which Vicki (member and organizer of a Toronto silent book club) explains the concept of silent book clubs and why they are catching on in Canada. 

I like it.  Now if someone in North Houston is listening…

You Can't Read without Decent Eyesight - And I'm Working on That One Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the first step in a process that will hopefully restore some of the vision I've lost over the past four or five years due to having macular degeneration and cataracts in both eyes.  
There's absolutely nothing that can be done for the type of macular degeneration I have other than to continue taking the vitamin/mineral supplement that I have already been taking twice a day for over four years.  If doctors are correct, that supplement does have a good chance of at least stabilizing the problem for a long time to come - and actually seems to have done that so far.  But the cataracts can be dealt with, one-at-a-time, and my right eye is scheduled for some attention early tomorrow morning.

The surgery, though, does require that special care be taken in order that the eye heal properly.  Other than the eye drops (which I can deal with easily) and special care not to bump the eye, that means that my right eye cannot be used for "heavy reading" for the next week.  Well, "heavy reading" is the only kind I do, so that will take some getting used to, but I think I can manage it with one eye.  But as soon as the process is over with the right eye, the same thing will have to be done with the left, so this is going to take a while  - things should finally be back to normal by the beginning of August, but that seems like a long, long time from now.

And in a case of rather poor timing, I see that I have some scheduled deadlines looming in the next two-to-six weeks that may suffer, so I wanted to explain what was going on down here in case I seem to be slowing down or even disappear for a bit.

I'm actually looking forward to the eye surgery because I've been living every avid reader's nightmare for way too long as my sight steadily deteriorated.  I cannot imagine ever losing sight to the degree that I would lose the ability to read a book and write about the experience. I have been an avid reader since I was five years old, and I plan to remain one to the end.  Your eyes are precious commodities, guys.  Take good care of them.

"Happiness is having your own library card!"

I witnessed something just like this happen in the parking lot of my local library Friday morning when a young mother handed her little girl a library card on the way into the building. The scene immediately made me think of this old Peanuts comic strip by the great cartoonist Charles M. Schulz.

I don't know if it was the very first time that little girl held her own library card in her hands or not, but the look on her face was the same combination of happiness and contentment shown here on Sally's face. I am positive that this mother has created another lifelong reader - and we can never have too many of those.

Sean Doolittle: A Reader's Reader Who Loves Indie Bookstores

Nationals Pitcher Sean Doolittle

I realize that I'm more than a bit prejudiced when it comes to my opinion that avid readers are a special breed. But it's a chicken-and-egg thing; are they special because they develop so much empathy from all that reading, or is it that particularly empathetic people are naturally drawn to reading lots of books?  I'll probably never reach a conclusion on that part of my theory, but my broader theory that readers are special is one I find pretty easy to defend.  In fact, over the last twelve years I've collected almost 100 stories about readers and compiled them here on Book Chase under this "Readers" label. 

And that brings me to the latest, a story about Washington Nationals closer Sean Doolittle, an athlete on a one-man mission to save America's independent bookstores one store at a time.  The Wall Street Journal (no link provided because the complete article is behind a subscriber firewall) featured Sean in an article this week in which the pitcher explains what he's up to:

"Washington Nationals closer Sean Doolittle found himself mired in an unusual predicament for a professional baseball player during spring training: He needed more books to satisfy his enormous appetite for reading - and he couldn't find a local bookstore near the team's facility in West Palm Beach, Fla..."

"Forced to settle for a nearby Barnes & Noble, Doolittle decided to embark on a project. He vowed to seek out an independent bookshop on every road stop this year and share his adventures with his Twitter following of nearly 100,000.  The idea began as a way for Doolittle, a two-time All-Star, to take advantage of a job that allows him to travel to cities around the country. It has allowed Doolittle to use his platform as a famous athlete for a cause that matters to him." 

Doolittle is on a quest to support the kind of local business that is active in its community and offers it the kind of "all inclusive" space that makes a community feel like family.  He wants to publicize those bookstores and help get the word out that readers still have choice when it comes to buying books; not all books have to be purchased from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Doolittle considers these places "important fixtures in their communities" and wants to make sure that they thrive so that others will be encouraged to open up bookstores like them.

Sean Doolittle is my kind of reader, and he proves one more time that readers are special people.