Skip to main content

Big bookshelf clean-up and reorganising madness




The TBR bookcase
The feeling has been building in me for some time of wanting to get rid of some books I previously assigned to the keeper shelves. I also want to reorganise the keeper books in order to get all the books of each genre shelved together, instead of stuffed wherever I can find room for them. I also think this could be an incentive to read or cull some of the older books on my TBR shelves, e.g. leftovers from the unfinished mystery reading challenge and other hilludraugar.

What are hilludraugar? I hear you ask. Well, it's an Icelandic word, here shown in the plural (the singular form is hilludraugur) that conveys the same meaning of uselessness as the English term "white elephant", but refers to smaller items and not necessarily expensive ones. It literally means "ghost on a self" and originally refereed to a thing that was haunting one's shelves and being useless and gathering dust but now has a wider meaning of "thing that gathers dust" literally or metaphorically. It's an excellent description for some of my TBR books.

I finally started the project on the Friday before last. I have already switched my TBR stack from the office into the living room, where it will be more visible. The keepers from the living-room shelf are piled up on both of my sofas, waiting for me to decide what to cull and what to keep, but I have been distracted by all the books I would like to reread...

I have already filled one box with potential culls, but I would like to get rid of as many as 50-100 books. The problem is that I have a very hard time letting go of travelogues - which form a goodly percentage of my keepers - when they
are about countries I have been to or want to visit, even ones I didn't particularly like when I read them.

One category I will definitely consider culling from are the mysteries. For a while when I was doing my 52 mystery authors challenge I would keep all the first books in mystery series that I came across, whether they were good or not, and I also kept several hard-cover mystery books because I love hard-cover books (and not because I thought I would read them again).

The hardest category to get rid of will be the children's books, especially old favourites I have kept since my childhood but have avoided rereading as an adult because I am afraid of having my rosy memories of them shattered. However, I recently learned that some libraries are quite happy to receive old children's books in good condition - especially classics - as the ones that are still popular are being read literally to pieces and replacements can be hard to find when they are out of print. I think I will make a list of the ones I have that are in good condition and check if my local library wants any of them.

Another problem is that after I finished arranging the TBR books in their new home I decided I wanted to move the bookcase and switch it over with my glass-fronted treasure cabinet that resides on the other side of the living room. This means re-emptying the bookcase, emptying the treasure cabinet, and dragging them across the floor to switch places and then re-filling them.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more