Our house, as you might guess, is filled with books. We have half a dozen bookshelves scattered throughout the house. They are mostly large and they are full. We also have piles of books we’re reading all over the place. When something becomes that big of a part of your life, you tend to get kind of quirky about it. So, here are our book/reading quirks:
Bookshelves
Cate and I have separate bookshelves. She has refused to mingle the two. She refuses because I have a special, glass enclosed bookshelf my dad made. I keep my very favorite books on this shelf. It is referred to as “the good shelf.” Cate won’t let our books mingle because she doesn’t want her books mixing with what she calls my rejects.
My organizational quirks don’t stop there, though. There is the good shelf, of course, but in general, my books are separated into categories: Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, Information Nonfiction, Poetry, Unread. Cate is much simpler. She pulls out only her women’s studies books and her unread books. Everything else goes together in a wild, alphabetical free-for-all.
Bookmarks
In the past, when I’ve given my students reading time, I read with them. I used a note card as a bookmark and when I spotted someone not reading, I wrote their name down on the card. I still use note cards for bookmarks, but they now have totally random lists on them. I currently have three in the rotation. One is a list of journals I mean to send stories to, one is the set list from the last Richard Thompson concert I went to, and one is the working reading list for my upcoming AP class.
Cate has lately taken to using paint swatches from Home Depot. She may or may not try hard to make sure the color on her bookmark compliments the cover of the book.
Reading
I subscribe to more magazines than I can really manage to read, and I’m always behind. I tend to go through week-long binges when I’ll read two issues of National Geographic, three issues of The New Yorker, and an issue or two of Harper’s.
Cate and I often read more than one book at a time, but I’ll confess that, unless one of the books is for a class I’m teaching (and thus has a set reading schedule) I’m incapable of really reading more than one work of fiction at a time. I get too sucked in and have to finish. I can do fiction and nonfiction concurrently, however.
I’m now going to give away one of Cate’s secrets: Her “what I’m reading” list is more a list of books she intends to read soon than of books she is actively reading. I’ve seen her have six or eight books on a list when I know she’s only cracked two or three of them. I think it’s equivalent to the book queues I give myself in that it helps her make sure she gets to certain things.
Do you have any reading quirks?
In my defense, I am actually reading everything on my sidebar right now!
I’ve always wondered about Cate’s reading list! If one was a morning book, one afternoon, one bedtime? Mystery solved! I don’t like to read more than one book at a time (which I am currently). After I get through the two, not again!
I usually have a book on my nightstand that I read just before bed. Otherwise, if I’m reading more than one book at once, they live on my side table in the living room…usually something more “fun,” like contemporary fiction, coupled with a nonfiction book or classic lit. Makes it easier to transition between them.
Where do I start? Having a few thousand books requires organization, so I do shelve mine by genre or category, then alphabetically by author and finally chronologically. Paper TBRs are stacked on the shelves of my end tables and coffee table. Now that I have a kindle I rarely have stacks of library books any more, but they are kept in a separate pile. I have a collection of bookmarks and like to pick something that coordinates with the book’s colors and subject matter. I prefer bookmarks with a tassel so I can flip the tassel into place when i stop reading, keeping the main part of the bookmark in place all day, so that I can visually mark my progress at the end of the day. I also developed this weird habit many years ago of stopping not at the end of a chapter, but a paragraph or two into the next one. I think that developed from reading authors who put mini cliffhangers on different POV’s chapter endings. I usually read a single book at a time, but the kindle has changed this a bit. If I’m reading a paper book I now prefer to read from my kindle on the treadmill, or have it read to me while I’m doing mundane chores, like dusting or folding laundry; so I try to pick something that relates in some way to the other book I’m reading, or failing that possibility, a well- loved comfort book or my classic fallback, any Jane Austen. That’s probably enough of a window into my reading quirks for now!
I had wondered how you kept your books organized. Having not married ’till 38 I had many years of keeping my books organized the way I want them (alphabetical by author within categories). Then when I moved into my husband’s house he started putting my books away on his bookshelves and now I can’t find anything. As a matter of fact, one of the items on my to do list is to go through the bookshelves and “rescue” my books. This is also one of the reasons I suddenly like the idea of an eReader–I don’t have to worry about my books getting lost on the bookshelves.
I like to choose the biggest bookmark that will fit in the book as then it seems I can find the bookmark easier.
I used to read only one book at a time and would like to get back into that but I seem more easily distracted as I get older. ;) As a matter, of fact, around college the only (recreational) books that I had were either “read” or “reading”–no TBR pile. Once I finished a book, I would have to go out and get another one. Then came paperbackswap.com and now I’m drowning in books to be read.
I have a tall book cabinet with glass fronts from Crate & Barrel that I treated myself to one year. I’m not too quirky with how I organize my books – all the craft books go on one shelf, the trade sized paperbooks go on another shelf, and the paperbacks get stacked on top of one another on the top shelf (I am snobby and don’t think as much of the paperbacks, so there are only 2 stacks). The Lois Lenski books I’ve gotten off ebay/library sales are also on the top shelf along with my mother’s hardcover set of Winnie the Pooh and her McGuffey’s Readers. I keep the books I’ve read and loved and kept (very few) on a lower shelf. I keep all of my bookmarks in a Norman Rockwell pencil box that I got as a gift back in the early 1990′s. It is full of all different types of bookmarks. The one I’m using right now is a leather one that says “May you live all the days of your life”. I am always on the lookout for books – at the library, the bookstore, discount stores, garage sales…so I have a huge amount of books “to read”. But I know I’ll get to them eventually.