Ten Ways to Organize Your Bookshelf

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July 20, 2017 | 17 6 min read

I recently moved to a new apartment, which gave me an excuse to pursue, without guilt, my favorite procrastination activity: reorganizing my bookshelf. It also forced me to go through each and every one of my books and ask hard questions like, am I really ever going to read The Forsyte Saga? (Answer: It’s been up there for 10 years, but maybe? I kept it.) Or: will I ever reread Middlemarch, and if so, will I want to use this yellowed paperback with a taped spine that I got for free off of a stoop? (Answer: No. If a person returns to Middlemarch, they deserve a fresh copy, possibly a reissue with interesting new cover art.)

covercoverOn my old shelves, my books were organized into four broad genres: fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Fiction was arranged by date published, nonfiction by subject area, and plays and poetry were not in any particular order. On my new shelf, I stuck with my broad genres, and within each one, I kept things simple and organized everything alphabetically. Boring, but effective. But part of the fun of reorganizing your books is considering all your options, so here are 10 organizational strategies for the next time you find yourself in the throes of moving, decluttering, or, if you’re anything like me, procrastinating.

1. Chronologically, by Date Published
As I mentioned above, this is how I have arranged the majority of my books for the past decade. It’s kind of a pretentious way to shelve your collection, and to make it even more pretentious, I got the idea secondhand, from a literary memoir. (I can’t remember whose memoir anymore.) But this method ended up working for me for two reasons: 1) the act of putting my books on the shelf in order helped me to remember history, and to get a better sense of which writers were writing and publishing at the same time, and perhaps influencing one another; and 2) when I add books to my collection, they’re usually brand-new, published recently, and it’s easier to just plunk them down on the end of the shelf rather than finding a place for them alphabetically.

2. By Color
If you have a large number of books, this is an extremely silly way to organize your bookshelf. I know, because I tried it once. I have a good memory for covers and I thought it would be an intuitive way to find my books—and would look pretty, too. What I didn’t realize is that the spines of books are sometimes a different color from the front covers. I found myself spending a lot of time looking for, say, a book I was certain was red, only to discover that its spine was blue. But, if you really love putting things in rainbow order, and you have a small number of books that you know well, this could be a visually striking way to arrange your shelves.

3. Artful Piles
coverI’ve seen this in design magazines and once when I was visiting a fancy Nolita loft, where tall stacks of art books were arranged in uneven piles on a long bench. It reminded me—not unpleasantly—of the scene in The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway visits Gatsby’s library and discovers that none of the pages of the books have been cut for reading. So if you have a lot of beautiful books that are just for show, artful piles might be the way to go.

4. By Subject/Genre
If you’re a collector of books on a particular subject, or a big fan of a particular genre, this is probably the most satisfying way to arrange your books. It’s also a good way to organize your books if you don’t have a good memory for titles and authors. I group my nonfiction books by subject because I don’t always remember nonfiction authors and titles as readily as writers of fiction. My subjects are: History, Criticism/Literary Interest, New York City, and Art/Design. (I debated giving memoirs, letters, and journals their own nonfiction subject area but ultimately decided to shelve them with fiction, since in many cases, I’m most interested in the memoirs of authors whose fiction I admire.) A handful of my books don’t fit into any of those categories, and they are stacked up vertically in a miscellaneous pile, near the art books.

5. Geographically
I’ve never seen anyone organize books this way, but why not? The question is, when you’re organizing geographically, do you go by the author’s place of birth or the particular place that an author is associated with? For example, would Joseph Mitchell be a New York writer or a southern writer? What about Ernest Hemingway? The Midwest, Florida Keys, or Spain? Another option would be to organize by the geographical setting of a particular book, which is somewhat more definitive, though many books are located in multiple locations and/or fictional places. A compromise might be to devote a section on your bookshelf to one particular geographical area.

6. In Order of Importance and/or Goodness
This could be a good way to start debates among guests. It also could be a good way to kill a rainy afternoon.

7. Secretively
If you don’t want anyone to know what you’re reading and/or if you don’t care about being able to find your books, you can place them on the shelves so that the spines are facing the wall. This will give your shelves a soothing, monochromatic look. It will also make it difficult for people to borrow books from you.

8. Alphabetically
This is the obvious, most boring method, but it might be the friendliest, too. Anyone looking for a book in your library will be able to find it. It’s kind of interesting, too, to see who ends up next to each other.

9. Randomly
You don’t have to organize your books at all. You can shelve them in no particular order, like Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review editor: “What I like about that disorder is that it allows that element of surprise and serendipity.” Personally, I couldn’t stand to do this at home, but I do enjoy perusing the strange mix of books that you find in beach houses and summer cottages, for the way it always leads to an unexpected choice.

10. Autobiographically
covercoverCredit for this idea must be given to the film High Fidelity (based on the Nick Hornby’s novel by the same name). Post break-up, a lovelorn record store owner, Rob, decides to reorganize his record collection autobiographically. He arranges his records in an order that only he can understand, the key to which are his life experiences and personal obsessions. He explains to a friend, “If I want to find the song “Landslide,” by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”

It could be argued that every bookshelf, like every piece of writing, is autobiographical, even with its veneer of objective organization, but I admit I can see the nostalgic appeal in consciously organizing my books according to the stages of my life. I’m not sure how I would end up grouping my books, but it would be interesting to think back on all the people—family members, teachers, friends, writers—who have influenced my reading, the classes I’ve taken, the authors I’ve met, the booklists I’ve clipped, and the summers I’ve whiled away. I’d also have to reckon with some of the less flattering aspects of my bookshelf, like the fact that a certain number of books will always remain unread, and another, larger percentage will never be reread because my hope of returning to them “one day” has nothing to do with a desire to reengage with the author, but instead, to return to a certain period of my life, a frame of mind, or even a particular person or place. To shelve autobiographically is to embark on a journey of self-examination, which is why I’m saving it for when I undergo a midlife crisis—or maybe when I move to a bigger apartment.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of Home Field. Her short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Chattahoochee Review, among others. Read more at hannahgersen.com or sign up for her newsletter here.

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Transfigurations of Self and Soul: Four Essential Essay Collections

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February 9, 2016 | 7 min read
In the age of memoir, essay collections are a tough sell. Like short story collections, books of essays seem destined to be sampled rather than appreciated start to finish. That is a shame. Good essay collections are performances: multiple acts of form and function, threaded together with theme. I have always loved the fiction of Andre Dubus, but it was not until I read Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Movable Chair that I began to understand the mind and heart behind the stories. This is not to say that essays serve an ancillary function, but rather that essays contain the inevitable need to require a point -- either one orchestrated by the writer, or one imbued by the reader. A masterful essay collection is a metered intellectual exercise. It is enjoyable to settle into the novelistic voice of memoir, but it is athletic to sprint, pause, breathe, and start again with the short-range essayist. Here are four essay collections worth reading: writers who challenge, surprise, and eventually reward their readers for staying the course. 1. White Girls by Hilton Als Als is a literary showman, and White Girls is a masterful routine. The first act, “Tristes Tropiques,” is a nonfiction novella about the writer’s complicated longing for SL (Sir or Lady), whom Als considers his twin. The essay takes its name from a book by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose own interest in twins mirrors the romantic manner in which Als considers his own doubling. “I have always been one half of a whole,” Als writes, for “my ghostly twin, my nearly perfect other half” was his stillborn older brother. At roughly 80 pages, “Tristes Tropiques” is massive, a seemingly illogical choice to begin a collection, but White Girls is no average performance. “This Lonesome Place,” Als’s take on Flannery O’Connor, is best captured in its final sentence: “Her work has moved away from the South as she defined and knew it, all the way to Hollywood, where Americans have embraced it, hearing in O’Connor’s voice her uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” Als writes with equal verve about Truman Capote, Eminem, Richard Pryor, Malcolm X, André Leon Talley, and James Baldwin, yet my favorite is his treatment of Michael Jackson. I first read “Michael” in The New York Review of Books, where even its four-part structure felt inevitable. The essay begins in 1972, when “the female elders tell us what to look out for:” the men who exit the neon-lit Starlite Lounge in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Als hears Jackson’s first solo hit, “Ben,” escape from the bar before the door closes. How fascinating that a film-soundtrack song about a rat was a “mournful ballad,” which was embraced “among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing.” “Ben” was Jackson personified, “all child -- an Ariel of the ghetto, whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.” The ability to capture a soul in a single sentence is no small gift. 2. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin Als mentions Baldwin’s essay about Jackson, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” in which Baldwin writes that “freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated -- in the main, abominably -- because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” To sing the praises of Baldwin as an essayist is nothing new, but The Fire Next Time needs to be read and studied more often. It is a pair of epistles; the first, “My Dungeon Shook,” is a letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the emancipation. Eternally a writer formed by hymn and sermon, his conclusion rises: “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.” “Down at the Cross,” the longer, second essay, sears the page. This was 1962, this is now: “It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else -- housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers -- would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.” Baldwin hits so many notes here, yet I always return to his strained relationship with God and his house. “On the blindest, most visceral level,” Baldwin never was able to “disengage myself from [the] excitement” of church: “There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord.” That Baldwin follows these memories with a critique of the structure and soul of that church is the rhetorical power of The Fire Next Time: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” 3. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults by Joyelle McSweeney Poet and playwright McSweeney carries her rhythms to prose, and the results are essays that remake the boundaries of criticism and personal narrative. The concept of the “necropastoral” describes the “manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral.” The occult angle suggests the blurring of the real and surreal, orchestrated by the strangeness inherent in most literature. Here she writes of Wilfred Owen (“The poems form a continuous, necrotizing battlefield, a skinlike surface, pitted and dubious, capable of inscription and unexpected transmission, full of holes and wounds through which pity can escape like a stench”); of Jack Smith’s continual, obsessive editing of his pastoral film, Normal Love; and her fellow Catholic artist Andy Warhol, who, “possessed by media, becomes another medium in a fluxing, necrotic, necromantic, anachronistic field of media” and others. Finally, McSweeney -- a poet-essayist elsewhere interested in transformation, as in “how Catholic saint’s lore is really a kind of media theory, an idea about how certain kinds of power moves from place to place” -- examines translation as perhaps the apex of art. Translation “works on extant materials and transforms them -- conforms them -- into new, sculptural, legible shapes.” Translation might be the most human of arts: it requires humility, transformation, resurrection in new language. In that vein, the art of the essay is an exercise in translation. 4. Sublime Physick by Patrick Madden It is tempting to call Madden’s approach encyclopedic, but that suggests horizontal over vertical inquiry. Madden’s range is certainly wide, but he also manages to dig, and the end result of his essays here (and in his first collection, Quotidiana), is not merely collection but accumulation. “Spit,” the first essay in the book, is a representative sample. Madden begins with learning how to spit while “walking down a thin path through the thick Maine woods” sometime in the '70s. Next he considers the antiseptic properties of the action, and how his daughter spit on him by mistake as they were about to enter church. He remembers his friend teaching him how to “gleek,” which happens to be the name of the space-monkey from The Wonder Twins cartoon, a monkey that chattered rather than spoke clearly. That idea of marble-mouthing makes him think of how his father, a member of the Notre Dame Glee Club, would sing to him and his siblings, and how Madden would become obsessed with the misunderstanding of lyrics. That leads him to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” -- “Catch the spirit, catch the spit” -- and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, who “was the envy of every boy he met because the gap in his upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and admirable way.” He continues to Isaiah 50:6, Mark 8:22, when a fan spit in the face of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, and, finally burrows down to personal stories, concluding with one of shame. This is what essays were made for, in the words of Madden’s introduction-style chapter: essays are “oxymoronic characters, rooted in the natural world, derived from real experience...always reaching toward ideas, trying to transcend mere description or depiction. Thus, essays, perform a kind of sublimation of the solid; from the concrete, they attain abstraction.” Essays as transfigurations of self and soul.
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| 7 min read
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Most Anticipated: Rounding Out 2009, An Epic Year for Books

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July 1, 2009 | 26 14 min read
At the beginning of the year, we noted that "2009 may be a great year for books." With the publishing schedule for the remainder of the year filled out, calling 2009 a great year for readers is now a certainty. If anything, 2009 is backloaded, with new titles coming in the second half of the year from legends like Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and fan favorites like Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Lethem. A peek into 2010, meanwhile, reveals more literary excitement on tap, with new titles on the way from Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Ferris, and others. Below you'll find, in chronological order, the titles we're most looking forward to right now. (Special thanks to the illustrious members of The Millions Facebook group who let us know what they are looking forward to. Not everyone's suggestions made our list, but we appreciated hearing about all of them.)In July, Dave Eggers continues the trend he started with What is the What, working closely with his subject to produce a work with elements of memoir and non-fiction. In Zeitoun, the subject is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, "a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four," who lived in New Orleans and disappeared in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A few weeks ago, The Rumpus ran a long interview with Eggers that touches on Zeitoun, among several other topics. Eggers first encountered Zeitoun when McSweeney's put out Voices from the Storm, an oral history of Katrina, and he told The Rumpus, "Their story intrigued me from the start, given that it's at the intersection of so many issues in recent American life: the debacle of the government response to Katrina, the struggles facing even the most successful immigrants, a judicial system in need of repair, the problem of wrongful conviction, the paranoia wrought by the War on Terror, widespread Islamophobia." (Scroll down to October for more "Anticipated" action from Eggers.)William T. Vollmann is known for his superhuman writing output, but his forthcoming book Imperial is a monster, even for him. Weighing in at 1,296 pages and carrying a list price of $55, this work of non-fiction is "an epic study," in the words of the publisher, of Imperial County, California along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ed offers quite a bit more discussion of the book. Don't miss the comments, where it's said that Vollmann has called the book "his Moby-Dick."August kicks off with what will no doubt be a peculiar literary event, the publication of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. It is a rare thing these days when a flurry of media attention centers on someone who has no interest in basking in it. And so, perhaps as Pynchon intends, the focus will be on the book. Inherent Vice promises to be odd. It's 416 pages, shorter than the typical Pynchon doorstop, and the publisher Penguin, in its catalog, notes that Pynchon is "working in an unaccustomed genre" this time around. "Genre" seems to be the buzzword here. The book sports neon cover art and follows a private eye (Doc Sportello). The book begins: "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to." Review copies are already out, and the early word is that the novel overlaps somewhat with and bears some similarities to Vineland.Inherent Vice shares a release date with a new book by Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic, which Entertainment Weekly has already called "very beach-y." (Sadly, it appears to have come in last in their poll to determine the "Must book of the summer.") It sounds like fairly standard "suburban malaise" fare in which a mid-life crisis is endured over the course of the summer, the upside for the reader being that Russo is bringing his considerable skills to the table. PW is fairly tepid on the book, "Though Russo can write gorgeous sentences and some situations are amazingly rendered... the navel-gazing interior monologues that constitute much of the novel lack the punch of Russo's earlier work."Of Roberto Bolaño's forthcoming, newly translated novels, Millions contributor Lydia writes: "I almost never know about the hot, up-and-coming items, but I do happen to know about this one, and I feel that, like many readers, my relationship to Bolaño has been one of breathless anticipation since the moment I first heard his name. Which was like this: at my old job, I was going through the mail. There was a New Directions catalog of aforementioned hot, up-and-coming items. I haven't historically had a lot of interest in contemporary trade publications, but New Directions has a very warm spot in my heart because I associate it with The Berlin Stories. Anyway, in said mag I read a blurb about Nazi Literature in the Americas, and thought it sounded really neat, and then learned I would have to wait a year to read it, and since then it feels like there's been a lot of waiting - sometimes with glorious gratification at the end (2666), sometimes not (Nazi Literature in the Americas, ironically). It's thrilling that they keep coming! The Skating Rink in August, Monsieur Pain in 2010. It's like new the James Bond franchise (btw, I'm a Craig, not a Brosnan). I just love having something to look forward to. I hope I don't wet my pants on the way to the bookstore." (Bolaño fans will also be looking out for Melville House's Bolaño: The Last Interview And Other Conversations)Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply returns to the territory of separated siblings (You Remind Me of Me looked at a pair of long-lost brothers.) This time, the focus is on twins, one of whom has been missing for ten years. The book garnered a blurb from Jonathan Franzen, who will appear later in this list and who says of Chaon's book, "I've been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I'm very glad Dan Chaon's the one to have done it"Let's just get this out of the way: In September, you are going to hear a lot about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.More importantly, we'll get Richard Powers' follow up to his award-winning novel The Echo Maker. In Generosity: An Enhancement, Powers explores the idea of patenting the human gene for happiness. Last year, Powers wrote about the human genome for GQ. There's not a lot of info available about this one but Ed Champion writes he "foresee(s) some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels," and Sarah Weinman "tweeted," "Richard Powers' new novel Generosity is about as audacious as a novel gets, and has fucked with my head as a reader every which way."Lorrie Moore is set to deliver her first novel in over a decade, A Gate at the Stairs. All those Moore fans out there are faced with a huge dilemma this week. Do they read the "Childcare," the excerpt of the novel that is the fiction offering in this week's New Yorker, or do they avoid the magazine and hold out for two more months until the novel comes out? We've never been big fans of the New Yorker's packaging of novel excerpts as short stories, so to all the Moore fans out there, we say - avert your eyes when you reach page 70 of this week's issue!Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is already out in much of the rest of the English-speaking world. In The Guardian, Christopher Taylor described the book as "a carefully arranged sequence of interlocking stories" and said, "while many of the stories hinge on artistic talent - the risks and unkindnesses associated with it; who's got it and who hasn't - the strong focus on more widespread problems in life makes Nocturnes more than a writer's thoughts on his job." The Complete Review rounds up the rest of the early reactions.Pete Dexter returns in September with Spooner. This one sounds like another dark, Southern tale not unlike Paris Trout, the book that first put Dexter on the fiction map. The first line of Spooner is "Spooner was born a few minutes previous to daybreak in the historic, honeysuckled little town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a make-shift delivery room put together in the waiting area of the medical offices of Dr. Emil Wood."We'll also get a new novel from E.L. Doctorow about a pair of brothers. Homer & Langley is about Homer and Langley Collyer, two famous Manhattan hoarders and recluses, who, after gaining notoriety for their obsessive habits and reportedly booby-trapped home, were found dead in 1947 surrounded by, according to Wikipedia, "over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades." Newsweek has an excerpt of the book. The novel's first line is "I'm Homer, the blind brother. I didn't lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out."Dan Brown is no doubt getting serious bank for his return to airport bookshelves and grocery store check-out lines, but he's not the only one having a great recession. Audrey Niffenegger reportedly took home a $5 million advance for Her Fearful Symmetry, her follow-up to her very popular The Time Traveler's Wife. Niffenegger describes the book on her website: "The novel concerns a pair of mirror-image twins, Julia and Valentina Poole... Julia and Valentina are inseparable, and function almost as one being, although in temperament they are opposites."Acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood will have a new novel out in September called The Year of the Flood, which has been described as "a journey to the end of the world." The Random House catalog, meanwhile, called it a "dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power." If that all isn't intriguing enough, it appears that the book is maybe (or maybe not) the second book in a trilogy that was kicked off with Oryx & Crake. Atwood and her publishers have offered mixed signals on the trilogy question. Quill & Quire looked into the question, and included a quote from Atwood saying, "It's not a sequel and it's not a prequel... It's a simultaneouel." Ah, one of those.In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker covers well-trod literary ground by focusing on a writer protagonist. However, PW gave the book a starred review, calling it "lovely" and saying "Baker pulls off an original and touching story, demonstrating his remarkable writing ability while putting it under a microscope." Baker's protagonist is Paul Chowder, who is tasked with writing an introduction for a poet friend's anthology and delivers the book's stream of consciousness narration. By all early accounts the book is quite funny and also deeply immersed in poetry, with digressions on a number of history's great poets. The Simon & Schuster catalog calls the book a "beguiling love story about poetry."It's my feeling that John Irving's fiction has fallen off quite a bit in recent years (the last really good read for me was A Son of the Circus), but I still keep an eye on Irving's new novels for any sign that he has regained his early career mojo. His last several books haven't tempted me, and it's probably too early to tell whether the Last Night in Twisted River will. Reading the first sentence of the publisher's description, we already find a couple of Irving's authorial tics, New Hampshire and bears: "In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear." Don't be surprised if a wrestler figures into the action somewhere in there. Still, Irving has compared the new book to The Cider House Rules. That's a good sign.The venerable William Trevor will have a new novel out, Love and Summer.Millions reader Matthew looks forward to Laird Hunt's Ray of the Star, due in September, "because Laird's novels are fantastic." Of Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez, he writes "This is his sophomore novel; his first, Part of the World was bizarre and funny." He plans to read The Museum of Eterna's Novel by Macedonio Fernandez (arriving in 2010) "because Borges sez so."October is sure to bring Wild Things mania and Dave Eggers is going to be right in the middle of it. He worked with Spike Jonze on the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. And, in what is sure to be the most literary novelization of a film (adapted from a children's book) ever, an Eggers-penned version of Wild Things is set to hit shelves when the movie comes out. There's also the fur-covered edition.New Yorker readers have already gotten a taste of Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming book Chronic City. Of the excerpt, packaged as the story "Lostronaut," I wrote, "This story was pretty awesome. It was the only speculative fiction to land in The New Yorker this year, not quite making up for the absence of Murakami and Saunders from the magazine's pages. This story is told in the form of letters from Janice, a 'Lostronaut' aboard some sort of space station, to her 'Dearest Chase.' She and her fellow astronauts are trapped in orbit by Chinese space mines and that's not even the worst of it for poor Janice. While the premise and epistolary style are intriguing, Janice's unique, irrepressible voice really carries the story."Readers are soon set to see the fruits of an ambitious project by R. Crumb, his illustrated Book of Genesis, a surprisingly faithful rendering of the first book of The Bible done in Crumb's unique style. Crumb talked about the project four years ago with Robert Hughes: "I was fooling around with Adam and Eve one day. Doodling about Adam and Eve. At first I did this satirical take off on Adam and Eve - lots of jokey asides and Jewish slang because they're Jewish right? God is Jewish... Finally I got over fooling around and I realized I just had to tell it straight."Booker winner A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, according to publisher Knopf's description, "spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves." The book is out already in the UK, where a review in the Telegraph included this intriguing aside: "Byatt's publisher is keen to present The Children's Book, her first novel for seven years, as an equal to Possession, the work that secured her reputation and her mass-market appeal nearly 20 years ago. It certainly compares to its popular predecessor in its daring and scope and, unlike the more cerebral parts of Byatt's output, is its equivalent in terms of storytelling and readability."J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is a follow up to Boyhood and Youth in Coetzee's series of memoirs. The NYRB recently published an excerpt.Quite a lot of sub-par material has been published in order to satiate the ravenous demand for Hunter S. Thompson's writing. Thompson's essays for ESPN in his later years were uneven at best, but fans may find something to like in The Mutineer, which Simon & Schuster says is "The highly anticipated final volume of the previously unpublished letters of Hunter S. Thompson, king of Gonzo journalism and one of the greatest literary figures of our time." Insofar as HST,in his latter years, may have been more entertaining and lucid in his letters, this may put The Mutineer slightly above the low bar set by other recent HST collections. On the other hand, the book is edited by Johnny Depp, implying that the book is more about venerating the cult of HST than unearthing new work on par with his best efforts.November will bring the publication of Michael Lewis' much anticipated chronicle of the financial crisis, The Big Short. In October last year, when economic uncertainty was at its height and fears were voiced in some rarefied quarters about the possibility of some sort of structural collapse, we wrote, "The world needs an exhaustive look at what happened in 2008 and why." There have already been several books about the collapse and what caused it, from The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown to The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, but many readers have been waiting for a book by Lewis, both because of his long history writing about Wall Street's excesses and because of the powerful essay he penned on the topic for Portfolio magazine in November. Some readers may be weary of the topic by the time the book comes out, but it's sure to garner some interest.The great Philip Roth keeps churning out new novels. This year's offering is The Humbling, Roth's 30th novel. The publisher copy says "Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance." The NY Times reported that yet another Roth novel, Nemesis, is due in 2010.Jonathan Safran Foer will have a non-fiction book out in November called Eating Animals, which most are guessing focuses on vegetarianism. An interview with Foer at Penguin's UK website would seem to confirm this. It doesn't mention the book, but the introduction says "Jonathan Safran Foer on why he doesn't eat anything with parents."Millions reader Laurie points us to My Bird by Fariba Vafi, translated from Farsi and originally published in Iran in 2002. The publisher Syracuse University Press says: "The narrator, a housewife and young mother living in a low-income neighborhood in [modern] Tehran...[is] forced to raise [her] children alone and care for her ailing mother... One of the most acclaimed and best-selling contemporary Iranian writers." Laurie adds, "The novel won several literary awards in Iran and, according to a 2005 article in the New York Times, Vafi never attended college and writes when her children are in school."2010: Probably the most anticipated book of next year will be the The Pale King, a coda to David Foster Wallace's sadly shortened life as a writer. We already know a fair amount about the book - it will center on an IRS agent - and three excerpts have been published already, "Good People" and "Wiggle Room" in The New Yorker and "The Compliance Branch" (pdf) in Harper's. A piece by D.T. Max went into some detail about The Pale King following DFW's death. Given the amount work that lies ahead for DFW's editors, this may be a second half of 2010 release.Also possibly arriving in the second half of 2010 is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which we are just beginning to hear about. The book is the long-awaited follow-up to Franzen's loved, hated, celebrated, Oprah-snubbing novel of nearly a decade ago, The Corrections. Franzen has been coy about the title - the book is reportedly called Freedom - but readers got a taste of what Franzen has in store in "Good Neighbors," an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.Joshua Ferris will follow up his blockbuster debut Then We Came to the End with The Unnamed. The Book Case writes, "The novel focuses on Tim and Jane Farnsworth, a long-married couple who seem to have it all. But Tim has twice battled a bizarre, inexplicable illness." Beattie's Book Blog mentions that the illness is that he "can't stop walking."John McPhee has a new book due out called Silk Parachute. McPhee wrote a 1997 Shouts & Murmurs piece called "Silk Parachute" about his elderly mother. It begins "When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur."Time Out NY says Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is about "Milo, a New York father who is on the brink of economic ruin, and covers themes including but not limited to 'work, war, sex, class, race, child-rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, the old-model brain, the commercialization of sadness and the eroticization of chicken wire.'"British publisher Faber says Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations "is a powerful novel about how our choices and our loves and the family life we build will always be an echo - a variation - of a theme played out in our own childhood."In the comments or on your own blogs, let us know what books you're looking forward to.
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17 comments:

  1. Sadly, after my last move, and then rearranging and redecorating my tiny house, my couple thousand books have no system of organisation. The best I can do is separate fiction from nonfiction, although I do have a couple shelves for short story collections. Also, my Willa Cather and Somerset Maugham enjoy pride of place on the on their own shelf. Luckily, like a good hoarder of books I seem to know where everything is!

  2. I have too many books to arrange them in any way. It would take more room than I have in my apartment to take them off shelves and put them back again.

  3. I read a lot of classics, and I keep those first divided by century, then alphabetically by author. Popular fiction alphabetized by author. Nonfiction has no particular organization.

  5. Good and useful paper, thanks to the author! In general I think that functionality should be the leading consideration in organizing your bookshelf, followed by aesthetic or other considerations.

    I have a bilingual library/bookshelf, roughly 60% of my books are in Hungarian, 40% in English-and I keep them separated.
    The Hungarian portion has much more nonfiction, a lot of poetry , and is subdivided also in Transylvanian Hungarian(where I am original from) and General Hungarian literature, along with fiction I have works of history, cultural studies, art books, albums.
    The English portion has professional(medical) subset, reference books, dictionaries/thesauruses/vocabularies separated, along with fiction( not much poetry…), and a lot of history-general and cultural, social history(American and universal), politics, albums ,and art books. I am running out of space, and I have double-spaced shelves already , I have to start trimming my collection.

    I think we should mention also our “digital bookshelves” too, with our iBooks and Kindle collections. They are organized by the programs-according to topics, subjects (iBooks), or alphabetically by author, or date of purchase(Kindle).Initially I used these to by quality thrillers,light reading , but soon I went into quality fiction and nonfiction too with same interest and written in English -only. So, along my cca 2,000 hardcopy books I have cca 300 electronic ones, easier to keep, not in need for dusting,but also in need of organizing&updating…

  6. My library used to be arranged by language (popular fiction) and nonfiction: art books, dictionaries and language study books, work related books on separate shelves. So far that is the best system for me.
    Now I tried a more fun way for the collection of fictional books as they are now in my living room and arranged them by color.. Definitely more visually pleasing, but harder to find a specific book if required..

  8. I arrange mine geographically – although I don’t go so far as organising it by regions, more by countries. So I have a section on French literature (both in French and in translation, plus biographies of French people, plus non-fiction etc.), another on German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and so on. The Latin Americans and Spanish/Portuguese authors are all together, because I don’t have that many, but if I did, I would start separating them by countries.

  9. By category, which differ widely. Bibles, prayer books, and historical family treasures; Gardening; Photo albums; classics; first editions; fiction and non-; travel; etc. Most prominent? The most beautiful, like the Waverly Classics and Roses. And within them, by decreasing height, pulled neatly to the shelves’ edges. Hey! I volunteered in my junior high library, where an inspirational librarian taught kids to love and respect precious books. My author office bookshelf is arranged by what I used last–like books on craft, poisons, police procedurals. It’s a mess that spills onto the floor!

  11. The fallout of having completed a PhD in English Lit is that I reallt do have thousands of books. Most of them are in the basement. The vast collection of fiction stacked against one wall. My 20th century British authors whose work I collect (Tolkien, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Salman Rushdie, among others are on the bookshelves in the basement. The bookshelves in the living room contain mostly contemporary fiction, some poetry – all on its own shelf – and a smattering of drama. The one bookcase in the dining room contains grammars, anthologies and dictionaries because I used to tutor students in my home and liked to have reference books close to hand. Within each of thise bookshelves I do often organize books by the colors of their spines simply to minimize visual distraction. The master bedroom and upstairs hall contains my husband’s books with no apparent organizational scheme.

  12. Mine are arranged geographically as well, but like Marina, only by country or larger region, depending how many I have in each group. As far as authors associated with more than one location, I base it on the location I most associate them with.

  13. I organize by author. If the writer has a series, the books are shelved in publication date order. Although I have more than 2,000 books, a lot of them are represented by a few authors, so the shelves look neat to me. I also organize by subject, where it is more likely that the books will be by a variety of authors. Non-fiction is on higher shelves, as I re-read those books less frequently. My favorite books are shelved at eye-level. When I decide to re-read the work of a writer, whether that work includes series or stand-alones or both, I read them in publication date order so I can follow the growth of the author. The only exceptions in shelving are for oversized books, like the Complete Sherlock Holmes, the Annotated Alice in Wonderland, and similar compilations.

  14. I’m old school, lol. I used the Dewey decimal system on the non-fiction. And alphabetical for the fiction. With the exception of x rated books that are on the top shelf, away from little hands. And the kids section, bottom shelf.

  15. Hey Hannah,

    Great ideas. I really think ordering books by color and size works best for me. Last week, I spent half a day in reworking my floating bookshelf. I think people really care about the first impression rather than convenience(being pretentious :))In the first row, I’ve placed red color, green and yellow in the second row, white and black in the 3rd row, and kind of similar color combinations in the following rows. Previously, it was arranged based on genre . To be honest, after this simple rework, I got great appreciations. I cannot upload an image here, or else I would have posted one .

  16. Other than finally achieving independence, my favourite part of moving into my first apartment was setting up my brick and wood bookshelves. Thirty-six years, one apartment, and two houses later I’m still seeking the perfect arrangement. I have bookcases in my upstairs study and downstairs rec room (the latter which has a framed sign on the wall saying “This Library is My Mancave”.) I’ve yet to sort everything perfectly, but I enjoy the ongoing project.

    Anyway, my novels tend to be sorted alphabetically by author, and if I have more than one book by a writer they’re sorted alphabetically by title. I have a lot of non-fiction books, especially history. Those are “sub-sorted” by subject matter (e.g.-WWII, Vietnam, India, the Tudors etc.).

    You can save space by laying groups of books (for instance, all my John Irving novels) in horizontal stacks. Maybe it’s just me, but I also think it’s aesthetically pleasing.

  17. Because of space Issues my romance, fiction, mystery’s are arranged in alphabetical order with colored tabs on the spine so I know which books to check when I am looking for a certain genre. I have a shelf in my garage which has a cover in front of it for my cook books, they are arrange by sets, Southern Living, Taste of Home, etc, I also have table top books in my living room. The only down fall is even though I used my Kindle I am still buying books sand the space is becoming less, and less.

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