While some of us are gifted with the ability to clean and organize our home, some of us need a little help. Probably on the floor near this bookcase is my latest manuscript, again mirroring my theme of the past and the present.Feeling overwhelmed by the clutter in your home and life? Want to clean and organize your home but you’re not sure where to start? And, of course, my career accomplishments - my titles and awards - round out my shelves. Bryce make the past come alive in new, rich ways. The latest from Jayne Allen, Kristan Higgins and Nancy Johnson keep me tethered to the present, while Kate Quinn, Maya Angelou, Sadeqa Johnson and Denny S. I need Beverly Jenkins’s “Something Like Love” close to Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror & the Light.” There’s nothing like having the exploits of Henry VIII’s court next to the political struggles of Olivia Sterling. My favorite authors and titles, things that move me, things I learned from, things that changed me. At the top are my Barbies: Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, the African Goddess (designed by Bob Mackie), Ida B. This shelf is close to my working desk and is often visible in my Zoom calls. My shelfie principle is to have things within reach that make me smile or make me think. Whenever I’m there, I always make time to just sit down up there and read quietly for an hour or so.
Then there’s a “real” library (as in, it’s a room completely lined with bookshelves and has no other function) in my old family home. There are roughly 2,000 books up here in my office. Also, I have biographies of people I think I’ll need to know about, medical history, a small collection of pornography and a shelf of family writings (my grandfather wrote occasional fantasy short stories), my mother’s one published book (professional - as in the teaching profession) and my great-grandmother’s Bible.
This is part of my working reference collection, which includes 80-odd (some odder than others) herbal guides a dozen slang dictionaries a “Claire” shelf, which has medical references (like the Merck Manual that represents the temporal limit of her medical knowledge in the Outlander series) and biographies written by and about doctors historical medical stuff Scottish stuff (history, language, customs, geography, novels and poetry by Scots, etc.) miscellaneous Big Books, ranging from a two-volume collection of the Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck stories by Carl Barks to books about historical costume, maps and things like the history of hurricanes. There is no rhyme or reason to how I arrange them, but as I read in one of the books I consulted (then discarded) to help deal with my little problem: “If it’s where you meant it to be, then it’s organized.” I am adopting that as my book-organizing principle. These are the books that are part of my daily life - for work, for pleasure, sometimes both. But there’s more, much more: the tumbling pile on my desk - propping up the computer I am typing on - and the volumes stuffed frantically in the bookcase in my bedroom and stacked in towers on and around my nightstand. These shelves now serve primarily as decoration or reference or as a lending library for guests.
Shelves I put together years ago, pre-children, remain generally intact: a full bookcase of poetry, alphabetized by author, and several jam-packed bookcases of fiction, also by authors’ last names. It’s not just that I have too many books and too little space.