Book Meme - Day 23

Describe how your bookshelf is organized. Why do you organize it this way? What other organization methods might you consider?

For the most part I have my books organized by genre and then further into subgenre. Within subgenres I mostly go by feeling. I put books next to each other if they're similar enough or if they both evoked the same feeling in me.

So, for example, I've got a couple of book cases of fantasy books. I have a couple of shelves devoted to series (Discworld and The Wheel of Time). I have a shelf for urban fantasy, one for portal fantasy, one for epic fantasy, one for chosen one tales, etc. The urban fantasy shelf shades from the more realistic (magical realism, a la The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake) to the more fantastical (The Dresden Files). The Magicians sits next to The Chronicles of Narnia because the former is a direct reaction to the latter. Sometimes books might belong to multiple sub-categories, and they just get put on whichever shelf has more room.

I have a non-fiction book case with pop science and history books and memoirs. I have a couple of shelves devoted to science fiction, broken further into dystopian fiction, space adventures, and time travel. Actually, I had to put time travel next to WWII, because I own a surprising number of time travel books about WWII. Or possibly WWII books with an element of time travel. Again, sometimes it isn't so easy to categorize a book.

Years ago I attempted to organize all of my books alphabetically by author then title (keeping series in order). It lasted less than a week because I couldn't find anything.

Conversely, a few months ago I put together a rainbow bookcase, expecting to take a picture and then put everything back where it went. But I ended up really liking the rainbow bookcase (it's actually two bookcases, next to each other). It's fun to look at. It's surprisingly easy to find books because I actually have a pretty good visual memory (this might be related to the fact that I was always better at geometry than algebra and physics fell apart for me when we started treating time as a dimension - I need to be able to turn word problems into pictures).

The thing I really like about my rainbow bookcases is that it provides a neat snapshot of who I am as a reader. I've got everything jammed in together. Memoirs next to young adult and fantasy next to physics text books. The individual books in each series are scattered all over the place. I love the contained chaos of it, possibly because it feels like it reflects what my life is like right now.

The only thing I don't like about the rainbow book case is that I can't apply it to my entire collection. It represents roughly a quarter of the books I own. Most of my books have either solid black or solid white spines. Or they have colorful spines that can't be easily called blue or green. And so those books are still being shelved according to my gut feeling genre system.

Honestly, the whole thing is a bit of a mess. But it works because I know exactly where every one of my books are. And that's the whole point of organizing your collection.