It may not appear as big a mess to you, but if you could see the other two shelves I have books on you would realize this is also rather a mess. While not one of my biggest cleaning projects to date, it was still quite a bit of work.

I love to read, and I have acquired many, many books. Too many, and there are some that I haven’t even read. To that end it was time to go through this and organize so I can go through them easier.

Naturally the first step is to take all of the books off of the shelves. (This also makes it easier to dust, and boy were these books dusty.) You know you have too many books when you find ones you didn’t even remember you owned. Also in a pile on the bottom shelf I found a bunch of old books. At the bottom of the picture above you can see one of those movie storybooks that I don’t see anymore, as well as a “big looker” storybook for the game Dragon’s Lair (which I do actually have for cd-I) and some old sticker books. I’ll get to reviews of them at some point.

Long ago I bought some decent bookends but only for three shelves. At this time I want the fictional books to be dominant so while I stacked my fictions here I put the non-fiction books aside. A future project will involve me going through those and getting rid of a few of them that hold no use for me. Speaking of which…

Remember when I did a quick review of the “Invasion” arc of Star Trek novels? I said I was going to go over them for my “Chapter by Chapter” series over on my other site. Well, after going over my collection I realized that I am not going to have time to do that, with all the books I have to go through, including other Star Trek novels–the biggest of my collection. So I actually won’t be doing that. I already know enough that I really don’t want to read them again.

The same goes for these three Star Wars books. Set well after the movie, the New Republic is trying to negotiate peace with another group, just as another faction is using specially designed Star Destroyers to attack the homeworld (former homeworld of the Empire Coruscant) while Luke goes searching for information about his mother and Lando and C-3PO come across a foreign spacecraft. In other words, not what I’m looking for in a Star Wars book, although a good read.

The remaining books were organized alphabetically with the series grouped together. (I currently have three different series, a few Doctor Whos, a woefully incomplete Issac Asimov‘s Robot City (a series inspired by Asimov’s robot stories) and the aforementioned Star Trek overload. I imagine I’ll be chopping that down at some point beside the “Invasion” stories.) One book I decided was technically a comic book (a collection of old Robotman newspaper strips, and for the record I’ve learned I don’t like the Monty years nearly as much–and now he’s taken over the strip with Robotman replaced with an inferior robot) and so I took that off of the shelves and put it with my comics.

I even put books that hadn’t previously been mixed with my novels. I’m curious to read Man Without a Country, Tom Sawyer, and the two Robin Hood  books, but they are very old editions (from when my Dad was a kid) and I’m afraid they won’t hold up to reading. Man doesn’t even have the cover attached. But they would make interesting “Chapter By Chapter” articles. Time will tell.

The entirety of my fictional books fit on the shelves with the bookends, but for now the fictional books are in more organized piles on the bottom shelf. (I also put the books and untranslated manga on that shelf for now, until I finally figure out how to get rid of them. I still haven’t found a price guide for untranslated manga.) Now it’s a lot more organized, although I do want to put the Star Trek novels in a more chronological order like I have the Doctor Who books. Still, a little each week and I’ll achieve my goal.

Future plans include organizing all my books by category, although it’s been years since I’ve worked at a library and my memory of the Dewey Decimal System is weak at best so I will split it up differently. But that’s a project for another day…

Related articles
Advertisement