Thank you to those of who voted in my little poll from a while back. You voted for a bookshelf tour, so here we go.

Unlike those lovely walls of shelving you see in drool-worthy shots on BookTube, Bookstagram, or home design magazines, my bookcases are spread out across my little apartment. In my living room, there are two 2-shelf bookcases (and one five-shelf set, but there’s only one shelf of books on it for reasons); I have one 3-shelf bookcase and one 5-shelf bookcase in my little studio for a total of five shelves’ worth of books, and one 5-shelf bookcase in my bedroom, which is full to the brim with books.

I don’t like double shelving books because I don’t want to forget what I have back there (on one shelf it’s a necessity, though) and I don’t like clutter so there are few knickknacks. And while I did tidy the shelves before I took the photos, it was mostly to dust and straighten up the things that were already there. My shelves are necessarily clean, or else Mina would knock things off them.

According to my LibraryThing app, as of this writing, I have 348 books, 95 of which are unread. There is a method to their madcap arrangement, and it works for me so I’m sticking with it. For now. There are days I get tired of the set-up, and just change everything up.

• Literary fiction, historical fiction, magical realism, memoir, and poetry are shelved together, alphabetically within the category.
• Nonfiction is roughly organized by Dewey Decimal classifications, though the history books are mostly on their own, arranged chronologically.
• Classics are mostly on their own shelf, arranged in their own weird way (partly by edition, partly chronologically).
• Science fiction and fantasy are on their own shelves, organized alphabetically by author.
• My books by and about J.R.R. Tolkien have their own bookcase, and the photography books have their own shelf.

Make sense? No? Oh well. Off we go.

We’ll start with the right-hand bookcase in the studio and go anti-clockwise from there, one bookcase per post. There will just be too much, otherwise. The SFF books might get their own series because it’s SFF. That’s how they roll. And I have a lot of them.

On with the books!

I’ll mark which of these are unread, and there will be Goodreads links to them if you’re curious about any of the titles.

Top shelf: historical fiction, literary fiction, magical realism

• Villette by Charlotte Brontë (unread)
• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (unread)
• The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (unread)
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (unread)
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Memoirs of Sherlock HolmesThe Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (purchased from Foyles in London)
• The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett (unread)
• Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett (unread)
• Silence by Shūsaku Endō (unread)
• Victoria by Daisy Goodwin
• Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene (unread)
• Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (unread)
• The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm (unread)
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen (unread)
• The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova (unread)
• Samarkand by Amin Maalouf (unread)
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (unread)
• Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
• The Night Listener by Amistad Maupin (unread)
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

And my only Funko Pop figurine of Arya Stark from the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. I did not buy it. It was a gift from a friend.

 

Middle Shelf: historical fiction, literary fiction, magical realism

• After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima (unread)
• The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (unread)
• My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (unread)
• The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (unread)
• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (unread)
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• The Blue Fox by Sjón
• Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó (unread)
• The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín (unread)
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (unread)
• Kristin Lavransdatter, pt. 1: The Bridal Wreath by Sigrid Undset (unread)
• Kristin Lavransdatter, pt. 2: The Mistress of Husaby by Sigrid Undset (unread)
• Kristin Lavransdatter, pt. 3: The Cross by Sigrid Undset (unread)
• Black Flower by Young-Ha Kim (unread)

The camera serving as a bookend is a Pathex 9.5mm cinema camera made– as far as I can tell– in France in the 1920s. The other camera is an Olympus 35 SP rangefinder made between 1969 and 1975.

 

Bottom Shelf: memoirs, poetry

• The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee
• Sixpence House by Paul Collins
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
• Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed
• The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag
• Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
• Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson (unread)
• An Anthology of Irish Literature, vol. 1  ed. Richard Green and Daniel F. Calder (unread)
• 100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings
• Time and Materials by Robert Hass
• The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master 
• Hopkins: Poetry and Prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam
• Extravagaria by Pablo Neruda
• Twenty love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
• Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Rilke’s Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Book of Images by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• Richard III by William Shakespeare
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The bookend is a little drawing I made on a scrap of paper during some free time in a college art class. I liked the result and found a shadow box to frame it in.

 

First bookcase complete! More to come! Later.