The Size of My View

My apartment is in need of a good cleaning as I write this which even by my standards are surprising, considering the extent I cleaned it on Monday. It never takes my apartment long to go to hell again, but this was a new record: Tuesday evening is when the book bomb went off.

My apartment has gotten messy at a quicker rate, but it has not gotten messy like this in a while. I got the crazy idea that I would start rearranging my bookshelves systematically as I had been gradually doing for a while. But this time I wanted a total overhaul, so I began pulling bins out of storage and pulling books out of those bins, and by 7:05 PM on Tuesday, this was how my bedroom looked, to say nothing of the front room:

“The horror…

By 9 o’clock, I had gotten a new piling system and moved the books off the bed.

As I’m writing this, I am still in the process of re-organizing my shelves and putting away books and boxes. This is made more difficult by the fact that I am not only selecting books to show off and (possibly) read, I am also going through my collection to find ones to sell or that I am no longer fond of. I am finding this easier than usual, recent events in my life have compelled me to let go of a number of things that I have held onto and no longer need. Grievances, possessions, unhealthy relationships, etc. 

Now comes the interesting trouble of organizing the books I want to keep and display at the moment. Inspired by an article I read, I have been creating categories that are off the beaten path which I display to you in the photos below in various states of competition.

Since this is the first one I finished, it seems fair to show it first. Going across from left to right each level the categories are anthologies, poetry, books in conversation with other books, books featured in Jonathan Yardley‘s Second Reading, Proust, The Paris Review, big fat tomes (any novel over 500 pages), crime/mystery, and short stories. Note: the McGrath, Naipaul and Baldwin books are being used as placeholders on their respective shelves since I ran out of books that would fit in that category.

When I started out, I knew that I wanted to do “typical” sections, but also wanted to jazz it up a bit inspired by an article I read about reading across genre and the idea of having a bookstore with no genres for fiction (scroll to the bottom if you click the link to find the part I’m talking about) and that was the spark that made me want to think outside the box beyond “mere fiction.”

Once again I have a poetry section here (I have at least three or four total in the apartment) along with spy fiction section (I normally don’t put multiple books by the same author together, unless they’re part of a series or sequence, with this shelf, I made an exception), assorted non-fiction, and film writings. On smaller shelves getting books and can be tricky if a book is part of a sequence and doesn’t fit because room has run out, which leads to the thing becoming like a puzzle box.

Here we have a selection of Folio Society editions with coffee table books.

From the top down we have Biography (with the poems of James Schuyler serving as a placeholder), drama, the books of my life (more on this later), short term TBR shelf (for anything I want to read in the coming month), and history/biography, which is still under construction.

To close this post I’d like to draw attention to the books of my life section. it’s a small section because it’s a small category (although ideally I would like a slightly larger shelf to include one or two more). These books transcend liking and loathing and have said something to me in a way that few books have. For those who can’t read the spines, they are The Stories of Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, White Noise, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert, The Remains of the Day, Selected Poems of Kenneth Koch, Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, One Hundred Poems From the Japanese, Fruits Basket, and Slaughterhouse-Five.

Of course, some of these may be arguable as I did read them sometime ago, and others I have not reread, but they are the ones that stay with me and I intend to talk about them in another post.

Patrick Paul Barrett