Tag: bookshelves

It was my birthday last week. I found, to my delight, that the Book Thing of Baltimore had just reopened (they were closed for a year due to a fire). It is basically a free book exchange. The place holds over 200,000 donated books. I asked my husband if for my birthday treat, we could stop there (for several hours) on the way to visit family. He obliged- and I wasn\’t the only one who got books! We donated, too- my kids and I all cleared some space off our shelves. We gave the Book Thing three boxes full of books, and brought home five in return. My six-year-old picked out nine books (in good taste- some Little Critter, a few Golden Books and a picture book about collie puppies that I remember fondly from long ago), my teenager got about fifteen (YA fiction and some cookbooks- she\’s honing her skills), my husband found just over twenty- mostly on history and languages. I combed all my favorite sections: sci fi/fantasy, general fiction, travel, classics, biographies, gardening, biology, animals/nature, women\’s studies, anthropology and staff picks. Here\’s my glorious haul. I don\’t at all feel bad for adding so many piles to the floor in front of my TBR bookcase- it will probably be a year or more before we visit that place again.

The first two in this stack I have actually read, and been on the lookout to add to my collection. The rest, I am familiar with the authors so eager to try more of their work:

These are ones I instantly recognized because they\’re on my listed TBR:

A few oversize/ photography heavy books:

The ones I got just because they looked interesting:

and a few possible oops– I already had a copy of Thirteen Moons– promptly sent this one out in the mail thru Paperback Swap when we got home. I know I have tried Mary Renault several times and not really enjoyed it… and I am pretty sure I once had a copy of Wild Animus, tried it and discarded onto the swap shelf. I guess the cover blurb caught my eye for the same reason again!

The book love didn\’t stop there. I received a few gift cards- one for Powell\’s! -and after getting a few items for my aquarium, I mostly used the rest to round out my collection of Gerald Durrell. The first one arrived today- Ark on the Move (with photos!) Thumbing through it I fear I made a mistake: it has chapters about pink piegons and bats, so I think this is another case where one of his books was published under two different titles. I\’ve also ordered Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons– and I bet it\’s the same text. Will have to make a few returns… I wish I could find a list somewhere of his titles pointing out which have alternative titles.

While I was updating my LThing catalog today, I took the time to add in all the titles I have on my e-reader. I didn\’t realize so many. One hundred. I\’ve only read seventeen of them! It feels odd to put them in my catalog. Do you count e-books, when you\’re tallying up your books? They feel intangible: I often think- if my device suddenly quit working, or got lost or destroyed -all those books gone in an instant (I should copy all the files to my computer as backup). And yet there\’s a plus to that: if there were a fire, and I wasn\’t preoccupied with getting my kids safe out of the house, I\’d probably grab my sketchbooks and the e-reader. It would only save a fraction of my library, but it would be something. There\’s so much unread stuff on it because I tend to forget they\’re there. Upcoming travels, it will finally see some use again.

Yesterday the library branch next town over had its annual sale. The two branches closer to me raised their prices the last sale I went to, but this one still had hardbacks at $2 and softcovers $1 each. I don’t mind spending when it supports the library! Here’s my haul, with a few notes:

I’ve still got a mild fascination with sailing and fishing operations. Thus Fishdecks. Nature Wars is about how urban sprawl is mixing with wildlife that adjusts to human presence -kind of like that book that called them ‘weed animals’ I’m thinking, only a lot more current. I’m finding that the more gardening I do, the less instructional and encyclopedic books appeal to me, but gardening narratives sure do. Those in this stack appear to be more of the narrative type, except for Success with House Plants. It just looked so thorough I couldn’t pass it up, and the pictures are very clear. Ditto with the aquarium fish book. I probably don’t need another bonsai book, I haven’t even read or applied the use of the ones I already have, but this one was very attractive. The horse book here looks a bit dated (especially in quality of photographs) but it seems to be full of stories illustrating the various points, so I thought it might be good. I’m gradually adding to my Calvin and Hobbes collection. But I haven’t paid attention to which of the volumes are compilations of several others, so I probably have a duplicate or two.

These I all got just because they looked interesting. The Wild Truth is about Chris McCandless, told by his sister. I wasn’t aware that she’d written a book! A Wayside Tavern is a duplicate- oops. I have another copy of that one picked up at the last sale. Caught my eye for the same reasons… I have not yet read any James Fenimore Cooper so here’s a go with The Deerslayer. I just looked it up- it was the last book he wrote of his series, but it’s a prequel to all the others- so probably a good one to start with! Alien Animals looks interesting, although another old, dated book- about introduced wildlife in various areas of the world and the problems they cause. Unicorn Mountain is an older fantasy novel about unicorns that are discovered living near a ranch and someone wants to get footage for a wildlife tv program but then they find out the unicorns have a disease so should they intervene? I like the straightforward-sounding approach to unicorns (the story doesn’t appear to have magical elements). Backyard Giants is about competitions to grow the biggest pumpkin. Castaway appears to be about some guys who deliberately lived on an island to see how they could survive there- reminded me of Thor Heyerdahl’s books when I thumbed through it- due to the writing style and age of the photos.

And these titles caught my eye because I’ve seen them on your blogs and they are probably all on my TBR lists here somewhere. I’m reading One Thousand White Women right now. It will be interesting to come back here in a few months (or years, who am I kidding) to see how my actual reading of these compares to the initial impressions that made me pick them up.

I also got a few knitting books for my twelve-year-old.

So I\’m participating in James\’ (supposedly) final TBR Triple Dog Dare. I just forgot to post an announcement because I\’ve been busy. The Dare basically means from now to April first I will only read books off my TBR shelves. With one exception- this short stack of library books I checked out earlier last month. Most of these titles were on my TBR lists, so they count too I think. But the main goal is to actually get through more of those books that have been patiently sitting on my shelves for so long…

Let\’s see how it goes!

all piled up in one room, waiting for shelving to be installed.

There\’s another few dozen TBR books under the bed as well

this stack next to my smaller aquarium

and my regular TBR shelf that\’s full of clutter because I don\’t have things all organized and put away yet. Oh, and the count is off- some more books here on the floor in front of little shelf that my father-in-law gave me (unfortunately I won\’t be keeping most of them- half are of a genre I don\’t usually read, and the other half books I know I love- because I already own copies of them!)

And last of all, the book I\’m currently reading. It\’s taking me a long time to get through this one, but what a fantastic read!

Yesterday was the end of the TBR Double Dog Dare! hosted yearly by C.B. James.

If I count up how many book posts I\’ve done since the Dare started, I read 22 books and abandoned one. There were a lot more I shuffled onto the discard pile, where I sampled twenty pages or so and then just realized I didn\’t want to continue, and the book didn\’t merit a post- I didn\’t get far enough into it to say much about it. My \”unread\” tag on LibraryThing now has 174 books remaining (down from 190-something three months ago), I don\’t have exact numbers because several times lately when going to mark a book off the unread list I realized it wasn\’t on there to begin with. I usually try to put books into the catalog when they come into my house, but I\’ve missed some.

My TBR shelves are now down to eight and a half- it feels a lot more tidy and manageable. I no longer have stacks of unread books on the floor (except for one of cookbooks) or across the tops of shelves. Feels like I\’m getting somewhere!

I only brought a few new books in during the Dare- one about an elephant that I won from Wolfshowl, and a lovely illustrated version of Pinocchio I just found at an antique store yesterday. I had one little lapse early on in the Dare, when I came home after a long day with a bag full of books a friend had given me for the kids. Including a cute little series about a hamster, and I sat down and read the first one on the spot. Then realized I broke the Dare! I\’ve since held off reading the rest of the Freddy books… So I didn\’t really stick to it 100%. But I feel like I accomplished a lot on the TBR pile, and that\’s something.

One glimpse of a pest will put me into a frenzy of cleaning. I saw this again– just one, scurrying away from the door, but twice as big as the few I saw last year (and never again since, until now). Prompted me to spend hours today super-cleaning the front part of my apartment- doing things I usually neglect- like moving furniture and using the nozzle attachment to get into all the little crevices where walls meet the floor, emptying my front hall closet to thoroughly sweep the floor (discovering that my kids have too many shoes. My three year old has more shoes than I do!) And, of course, I went through all the bookshelves. Removing books, dusting, fanning the pages, flipping the shelves, replacing. Again and again. Looking for signs of silverfish- sprinkles of their droppings, white dust of shed skins and most of all, chewed-on pages. Examined very closely my older, used books some already yellowed pages and tattered edges. Thankfully no signs of insect damage. So wherever those things come from, at least they haven’t found my little library yet. But of course going through all the books makes me treasure them again. And this time I had an eye to what my daughter might like to read.

She’s about to turn ten, and reads at a sixth or seventh-grade level. I used to have a lower shelf with some books sorted on it just for her selection, but she seems bored with that. I’ve found that she doesn’t much like the animal stories that enthralled me as a kid, so I will probably never get her interested in Black Beauty or The Yearling. She likes stories with magic or mystery in them, and also historical fiction- she read a ton of the Magic Treehouse series and the older Nancy Drew books a while back. She loves Harry Potter, has seen all the movies many times, but so far only read one book of that series! So I’ve tagged a bunch of books off my shelves, to suggest and hope she’ll read them. I’d love for her to love the books I’ve loved!

Half Magic by Edward Eager
Socks by Beverly Cleary
Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassidy
The Secret Garden by Frances H. Burnett
A Little Princess by Frances H. Burnett
the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper
Fox Farm by Eileen Dunlop
Summer Pony by Jean Slaughter Doty
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
the Kitchen Madonna by Rumer Godden
Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
A Wizard of Earthsea (and its sequels) by Ursula K. LeGuin
A Wrinkle in Time (plus sequels) by Madeline L’Engle
A Book Dragon by Don Kushner
The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
all the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
the Iceberg Hermit by Arthur Roth
Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls
the Changeling by Zilpha Keatly Snyder
the Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatly Snyder
Peter Pan by James M. Barrie
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
the Neverending Story by Michael Ende
the Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare
Dragonsong (and its sequels) by Anne McCaffrey
Amy’s Eyes by Richard Kennedy
the War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel

Yeah, lots of those are classics or animal stories- but one can always hope!
I’ve got another selection for a little further on, when she’s a bit older (some are more complex and I’d think she’d get bored- others the content is a just more mature).

the Lastborn of Elvinwood by Linda Haldeman
Thursday’s Children by Rumer Godden
Beauty by Robin McKinley
Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
the Blue Sword by Robin McKinley
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
the Fur Person by May Sarton
Ratha’s Creature (and all sequels) by Clare Bell
Bright Candles by Nathaniel Benchley
Light a Single Candle by Beverly Butler
Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser
Sabriel (and sequels) by Garth Nix
the Mimosa Tree by Vera and Bill Cleaver
the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams
Saturday the Twelfth of October by Norma Fox Mazer
Izzy Willy Nilly by Cynthia Voigt
A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voigt
Nightpool by Shirley Rousseau Murphy
the Ivory Lyre by Shirley Rousseau Murphy
Wringer by Jerry Spinelli
House of Stairs by William Sleator
Interstellar Pig by William Sleator

(what do you think of my picks?)

I’ve made a little system, quite simple. I put a paper strip in the selected books, sticking out, with the title written on it. When my kid wants to read a book, she can just give me the slip of paper and then I know which one she’s borrowed. I think she likes the idea that she gets to “check out” books from mom’s library, ones earmarked especially for her.

The little one is growing into a reader too:

I have, for many years now, been slowly working through several goals in relation to my reading. The foremost of course are to read all the books that I own, read most of the books on my written TBR list, and to write about all the books I can remember having read. This last I\’ve been slowly making progress on- I have a few compiled lists from the years before I began blogging, and whenever I write a past reads posts, it catches up some on that.

But I\’ve been thinking lately about yet another goal.

I would like to take one year, and only read books off my permanent shelf. I wonder if I could make it through them all- it would be about seven hundred books, far beyond the usual amount I read in a year- but then, they would all be re-reads, so maybe I\’d go through them faster. I think much of it would be enjoyable, delightful in fact, as I\’ve kept these books because I loved them. But I\’m also afraid at meeting some serious disappointments- many I have not read in a decade or more, they might not stand up to a re-read. Especially those I haven\’t read since my childhood, or teen years.

So… am I crazy? I\’m wondering if I\’ll ever do this at all. But definitely feel the need to meet one of my other goals first. Getting through all the books on the TBR shelves, at the very least.

A new year, and the Dare is underway. I\’m participating for the fourth time. Last year I manage to stick to it all the way to April, and read thirteen books off my shelves. In 2012 I cleared seventeen books. 2011 was siderailed by the urge to read pregnancy books, so I only did the Dare for one month. I\’m planning to go all the way again this year, although I still have a handful of fish books from the library in my house. But they came in before the year rolled over, so that\’s fine. Here\’s what\’s on the reading menu this year!

This is my main TBR shelf, plus that stack on the floor to the side.

I also have this small bookcase, the bottom shelf holds a lot of coffe-table nature books, mostly National Geographic ones and books featuring some national parks.

There\’s also a lot of large books full of nice big photographs on this shelf that I haven\’t read yet, most of them about animals.

And we can\’t forget the addition of some fishie books that were recently given to me!

That\’s a total (if my LibraryThing tally is accurate) of 244 books I have available to read off my own shelves. Let\’s see how big of a dent I can make this time.

Have you ever wondered what will happen to your personal book collection when you die?

Not that I expect this to occur any time soon, but sometimes I think about it. I picture myself decades from now, an old lady in a little house or nursing home all alone yet not too lonely as I am content to be surrounded by my books and have ample time to reread them all!

And then I wonder where they will go after me… I would of course leave them to my daughter, who\’s becoming an avid bookworm in her own right, but she\’s not really interested in the animal books so she might not really want them all. I wonder if a library might take the collection but I know the actual fate of most books donated to libraries: they end up in the annual library sale and if not purchased, get recycled. Very rarely do they get into circulation for library patrons. (All you librarians out there correct me if I\’m wrong!)

Sometimes I fantasize a dreadful future where the wildlife has all gone extinct, but my odd collection of animal reference books will be valued for its subject matter. But of course, any public library has a more extensive collection than mine about the same, so why would my books be special? ha ha

I just hope wherever they do go someday, they would continue to be appreciated!