What's on your bookshelf?

[Redlass]

Filling a bookcase is like Gathering a social circle.
-- May Lamberton Becker

I was reading this quote in my file of book quotes today and it got me thinking.

I can always tell a book person when they come into my house. They always go to my bookshelf and look at what is on the shelf. Granted, sometimes, I'm ashamed of what's there because it has become a repository for some books that I'm getting rid of. The "real" books are by my bed where I won't let any guest in my house go because our room is such a disaster area.

Since we can't all visit each other's houses, I thought it might be interesting to learn a little more about each other:

1. Pick one bookshelf in your house (I know this is tough, but try).
2. Tell us what's in it--or at least what's on one shelf.

I'll do this when I get home tonight since I can't tell you from memory.

[Grouch]

The only bookshelves in my house are the ones that belong to me and I've got them all sorted alphabetically, according to:
a) books I've read
b) books I haven't read
(pretty complicated system, huh?)

So, closing my eyes and extending my finger randomly into space, this is where it lands (shelf of read books):

"RL's Dream" by Walter Mosley
"Gone Fishin'" by Walter Mosley
"Black Betty" by Walter Mosley
"Fearless Jones" by Walter Mosley
"Two in the Far North" by Margaret Murie
"In the Land of Men" by Antonya Nelson
"Disappearance: a Map" by Sheila Nickerson
"Boy With Loaded Gun" by Lewis Nordan
"The Sharpshooter Blues" by Lewis Nordan
"The All-Girl Football Team" by Lewis Nordan
"Music of the Swamp" by Lewis Nordan
"Wolf Whistle" by Lewis Nordan
"Lightning Song" by Lewis Nordan
"We Were the Mulvaneys" by Joyce Carol Oates
"The Habit of Being" by Flannery O'Connor
"Flannery O'Connor: In Celebration of Genius" edited by Sarah Gordon
"The Complete Stories" by Flannery O'Connor
"Mystery and Manners" by Flannery O'Connor
"Everybody Has a Story to Tell: Sories of Flannery O'Connor's Milledgeville" (collected by the Festival of Youth)
"Three Novels: Wise Blood, Everything That Rises Must Converge, The Violent Bear it Away" by Flannery O'Connor
"Wyoming Summer" by Mary O'Hara
"The Circus Fire" by Stewart O'Nan
"The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje
"An Instance of the Fingerpost" by Ian Pears
"The Thanatos Syndrome" by Walker Percy
"The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy
"This Present Darkness" by Frank Peretti
"The Ice Harvest" by Scott Phillips
"Wyrd Sisters" by Terry Pratchett

Sorry you asked?

[murasaki]

First, let me explain my system: I generally sort by hard covers and paperbacks. Most of the paperbacks are in the bookcase in the spare bedroom, in double rows and double stacks on each shelf.

My "front room" bookcases have mostly hard cover books organized in the following categories: classic lit., fantasy, reference books, and general fiction. Some of the classics and general fiction are mixed together and sorted by height. I also have the small space on top of my kitchen cabinets filled with reference type books (old text books, non-fiction books I don't need read to hand and the like).

So here's one shelf:

The Tale of Genji
Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary (wouldn't fit on reference shelf)
Literary Theory in Praxis (ditto)
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
A Gesture Life
Storm Warning
The Color Code
Paradise (I never figured out who the white woman was either)
Stones from the River
Thrones, Dominations
The Floating Girl
The Hippopotamus Pool
He Shall Thunder in the Sky
Lord of the Silent
All ten volumes of The Sandman and Death, along with two other Gaiman tales
and the unpublished manuscript of Outlander: Quest (the sequel to Outlander: Captivity by BJ Salterberg which I am dying to review and isn't in the database).

The next shelf down holds:
National Gallery of Art book
Illustrated World Encyclopedia (in one volume)
The Timetables of History
Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language
Contemporary American Poetry
Seven Language Dictionary
Roget's Thesaurus
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol I & II
The Norton Anthology of World Literature

I need more shelves. I already fill the ones I have and then some and we just keep buying books.

--naomi

[tipu]

Hey, I finally got a bookshelf!

I helped a friend move across town, and he didn't feel like lugging this wooden behemoth, so I took it, broke my puny mussels hauling it up two flights of stares, and I freed a few boxes of the books they was carryin...

Pretty small thing, four shelves. Bottom shelf has a 7-volume set—Sacred Writings, edited by Jaroslave Pelikan that I got from a book club for a song... or rather, a tune. Two volumes of Sheik Ahmed Deedat's The Choice, which has him trying to convince readers of the superiority of Islam, a pair of Ellen G. Whites, a tiny thing called On Job by Gutiérrez that I've enjoyed immensely, Bruce Ritter's Sometimes God Has a Kid's Face, The Book of Mormon, a small text on Sufism, sitting beside Gould's Full House, Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge and Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World... I like the irony.

Shelf above is mainly for the funnies... I spy a pair of Pratchetts, two volumes of Vonnegut, a Norton Juster I had to grab off half.com after reading an epinion (damn Ailsa! :p), writings of S. J. Perelman and Shel Silverstein, translations of Martial and Molière, Douglas Adams's Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and Zacks's An Underground Education, a yearbook from the year I spent as a teacher's assistant in Bucharest and a volume of children's writing that has a story I wrote...

... next shelf is devoted to boring stuff... peeping over I see Genome (curses on Peter! ), Blackburn's Think, Daniel Boorstin, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Gilmore's Alice in Quantunland, a small thing called The Search for Planet X... stuff I put out as decorative pieces.

Top shelf has mainly reference stuff. Three books about language, word origins, etc. and Pat O'Conner's Words Fail Me... a big huge chunky thing called Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers, a quick volume: Movies: A Crash Course...

... if ya just fell asleep you've wasted yer time 'cos I'se done! I was glad to unpack these, but more remain in boxes still.



David, if I visited the chunk of shelf you described, you'd probably find a few Mosleys missing... I missed out on a chance to get an autographed edition of RL's Dream and had to remain content with a normal edition of Blue Light... which started out grandly but fizzled out...

Naomi... baybee... did you say the compleat Sandman story arcs?

Guard them very carefully, I'm comin over...

[soxfan[$]]

Man, this is tough.

I've only got two bookcases. One has scripts, some history books, foreign language books left over from college and high school, and some random reference works. The other has popular fiction, Dave Barry, poetry, classic novels, more history, sci-fi, and other random books. And baseball. Lots of baseball.

Here's my shelf (from the grabbag bookcase):

First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors
The Red Sox Fan Handbook
Frommer's Boston
Chicks on Film
A Treasury of Hans Christian Andersen
The Norton Introduction to Poetry
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
America in Search of Itself
Literature & Society
Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion
The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball
Literature: The Human Experience
Trinity
Tom Brown's School Days
London: The Novel
The Golden Notebook
The Wind in the Willows
Red Sox Century
The Power Game
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Soloist
Primary Colors
Farewell My Concubine
Big Trouble
The Once and Future King
Working
Watership Down
The Agony and the Ecstasy
The Dark is Rising
The Joy Luck Club
Division Street: America
Underworld
The Tao of Pooh

Ailsa
who needs more shelf space!

[murasaki]

tipu dahling,

Yes, I did say I have the compleat Sandman story arcs--all ten volumes. I spent my entire book allowance for two months to buy them last year. They were worth it.

Now, if I can just work them into the English Lit curriculum at West Point...

--naomi

[jenninca]

Well, most of my books are at school, but I'll give you the contents of my hardcover and oversized paperback shelf (they don't go to school).

My Laura Ingalls Wilder collection - "Searching for Laura Ingalls Wilder," "Little House Sisters," "Laura Ingalls Wilder Country," "Laura's Album," "The World of Little House," "Little House in the Ozarks," "A Little House Guidebook," "A Little House Reader," "Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Iowa Story," "A Wilder in the West," "A Little House Sampler," "The Little House Trivia Book"

"A Blue-Eyed Daisy" - Cynthia Rylant
"Out of the Dust" - Karen Hesse
"Among Schoolchildren" - Tracy Kidder
"Savage Inequalities" - Jonathan Kozol
"The Confessions of Nat Turner" - William Styron
"There Are No Children Here" - Alex Kotlowitz
"Memories of a Time Just Past" - Guillermo Arango (my HS Spanish teacher)
"Charlotte's Web" - E.B. White
"Speak" - Laurie Halse Anderson
"Holes" - Louis Sachar
"Ramona's World" - Beverly Cleary
"Bud, Not Buddy" - Christopher Curtis
"A Wrinkle in Time" - Madeleine L'Engle
"Preacher's Boy" - Katherine Paterson
"Just Ella" - Margaret Peterson Haddix
"A Long Way From Chicago" - Richard Peck
"Walk Two Moons" - Sharon Creech
"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" - Roald Dahl
"The Velveteen Rabbit" - Margery Williams

All four Harry Potters

Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends," "A Light in the Attic," and "Falling Up"

No, I don't read many adult books. I've got about one shelf of them and that's it.

Cindy

[hypotenuse]

This is the top bookshelf in my room. Posting so that I can start packing them. Most of the others are already boxed and stacked in the basement.

K. Here we go:

This is the standing up part...

Access 2000 Developers Handbook (3 volume set)
Core Java 2 - Fundamentals
Core Java 2 - Advanced Features
SQL Server 2000
Harbrace College Handbook
Instant Quote Dictionary
Webster's New World Dictionary
Annals of the Former World - John McPhee
Climbing Mt Improbable - Richard Dawkins
How Many People Can the Earth Support - Joel Cohen
Extinction - David Raup
Genome - Matt Ridley (damn Peter indeed!)
Letters From the Earth - Mark Twain
Winning Chess Tactics - Yasser Seirawan
Consilience - Edward O. Wilson
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Richard Feyman

On their sides, crunched up in any available empty space...

A Shadow on the Glass - Ian Irvine
Traitor's Sun - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Deryni Magic - Katherine Kurtz
The Bastard Prince - Katherine Kurtz
Wizard's First Rule - Terry Goodkind
Magic's Pawn - Mercedes Lackey
The Robin and the Kestrel - Mercedes Lackey
Carnivores of Light and Darkness - Alan Dean Foster
How To Solve Word Problems in Algebra - Johnson
Mine to Take - Dara Joy

Lynne

[Redlass]

Right now we have only one bookshelf in the house that is even remotely organized. The rest of our books are sitting in boxes.

However, last December I finally got around to organizing the bookshelf in our living room. I'm not sure the organization would make sense to anyone other than my husband and I, but here it is.

Top Shelf
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church
The two books I've written
A Methodist hymnal from the 40s
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
Plato's Republic
Two Bibles, one NIV and one KJV
The second half of the shelf is devoted to books we've borrowed from the library or other people.

Second Shelf

Two sets of the Complete Works of Shakespeare
Backstage Guide to Stage Management
An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski
A Shakespearean Actor Prepares
3 audition books
7 monologue books
5 collections of plays
All the scripts from shows that my husband or I have been in or worked on.
Scripts to several Shakespeare plays
7 New England Shakespeare plays from 1904 (they used to belong to my husband's grandfather. He was a headmaster at a New England school at the turn of the century)

Third Shelf
Dictionary
Poetry of Robert Frost
Viking book of poetry
2 drama collections
3 Agatha Christie novels
12 books on child-rearing and baby care
Uppity Women of Shakespeare's Time

Fourth Shelf

55 paperback young adult books that are in front of a set of Childcraft encyclopedias and a set of 12 hardcover collections of children's stories.

Fifth Shelf
All our cookbooks and cooking magazines.

[mshawpyle]

Baaaaad question, darlin'. I double-shelve. Just in the office alone, solely the first layer in the case and a third of what's atop the credenza, gives:

Ferguson, Virtual History; Lukacs, The Last European War; Massie, Dreadnought; Ambrose, Upton and the Army; Mattingly, The Armada; Pfanz, Ewell; Hesketh, Fortitude; Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American; McPherson, Drawn With the Sword; Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell; Dixon & Southern, The Roman Cavalry; Haward Bain, Empire Express; Tanner, Stonewall in the Valley; Webb, The Texas Rangers; Webb, The Great Plains; Shelby, Stonewall Jackson as Military Commander; Churchill, The River War; Deighton, Blitzkrieg; Morris, Pax Britannica; Arnold, Jeff Davis's Own; Stiles (ed.), In Their Own Words: Civil War Commanders; Dyakov & Bushuyeva, The Red Army and the Wehrmacht; Beevor, Stalingrad; Matthews, Shadows Dancing; Brockman, The Two Sieges of Rhodes; Greene, A Personal Country; Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West; Palmer, The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire; Mayer, All On Fire; Gill, A Dance Between Flames; Cullen, The Civil War and Popular Culture; Haythornthwaite, The Armies of Wellington; Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff; Musicant, Divided Waters; Barry, Rising Tide; Anders, Hearts in Conflict; Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World; Weintraub, MacArthur's War; Horgan, Great River; Farwell, The Great War in Africa; Foote, The Civil War (I through III); Morton, A Nervous Splendor; and Gellman, Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles.

You asked....