Books, books and more books

Doug and I both read a lot. I make a weekly trip to the library, but we also have a lot of books.

The living room shelves
The office shelves
Bedroom shelves

More bedroom shelves
Yet more bedroom shelves
Are you getting the sense that there are a lot of books in the bedroom yet?
My nightstand

Doug’s nightstand

And then there are the books that we carry around with us so we’ll have something to read no matter where we are. Doug is currently reading a history of tabletop gaming and I am currently reading the last book of a terrible YA series that I nevertheless feel obligated to finish because I already read the first three books and it’s not like it’s hard. Yeah, I don’t really get that either.

I recently read a blog post about how to judge a book collection and so I thought it would be interesting to see what our books say about us.

1. Our most-referenced cookbooks pretty much say, “I’m a lush.” Hm. In fairness though, I’ve been cooking from blogs a lot recently so perhaps we need to look at my web history to get a full picture there.

2. We’re Christian, though we have books of such diverse theological stripes that you’re be hard-pressed to figure out what type. I’m reading Anne Lamott and the Heidelberg Catechism. Doug is reading something arcane because he’s teaching the Heidelberg Catechism. For the record, we’re United Methodist, which is squarely Mainline Protestant, but Doug grew up Lutheran and I grew up Catholic so we’ve both sort of wandered all over the map.

3. We play Dungeons & Dragons, which is most evident in the fact that the shelf I have pictured above is actually full, but missing a few books because they are sitting on the dining room table. These are probably the reference books that get accessed most frequently in our house.

4. Decorating magazines and historical decorative arts reference guides get accessed fairly often as I try to identify stuff I bring home.

5. My fantasy and sci fi collection gets pulled out and dusted off once every two years or so when I need a pick-me-up.

Anyway, the point is, we have a lot of books. It creates a bit of a decorating dilemma because nearly every free wall we have is filled with bookcases. But it’s who we are, so there’s really no getting around it. Some day I’d love to find a good solution for breaking up the walls of books, but so far we haven’t had a lot of luck. Maybe we just need to break down and acknowledge that we need a Library instead of an Office.

What do your books say about you? If you have a TON of books, how do you decorate around them? Do you even try?

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0 thoughts on “Books, books and more books

  1. I was just checking through my Google Webmaster links and saw you had linked back to me! Thank you! Sorry I didn't notice sooner.

    We just moved all our books to my boyfriend's parents' house while we're in the middle of moving from one place to another. We don't have a new apartment yet and have no idea how much space we'll have. We have dedicated areas for books in our home and try to keep them organized as much as possible by author and topic. So all our Southern literature is together in one spot, along with Southern horticulture reference books. Not exactly Dewy Decimal but sort of.

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