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

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more