My Bookshelves

I’m sad to say my reading speed is not keeping up with my posting speed! I blame school (because it’s easy to). It’s forcing me to come up with some more creative things to post here that still relate to books and reading. I hope none of you mind! I thought today I’d take you on a brief tour of my bookshelves.

I don’t believe bookshelves are only for books! You can see I keep a number of knickknacks on my shelves. The right one has some games, travel mementos, and a lot of my Harry Potter keepsakes. The center one has some keepsakes and the left has pictures, coin banks, and some workout equipment. If there’s space on the shelves, I’ll fill it! I also love having things on top so you’ll see our wine rack, my paper model of the Titanic, and a wedding picture with our families.

The left and right bookshelves, the bigger ones, house books I’ve read or don’t intend to read, either because they’re my husband’s school textbooks or they’re reference books. These are alphabetized by author and further by title. In the event of a series, I keep the series together.

The center bookshelf is my TBR. Yes, I have a physical TBR. The LOVE book in the middle is an ArtFolds of Sense and Sensibility that I did over a year ago and I love it (even if I didn’t love the book). I keep this book in TBR order, based on what’s been on my Goodreads TBR shelf the longest. This is the first time in over a year that I haven’t had anything on the bottom shelf, so I had to find another way to fill it. Those volumes are the publications of my short stories. There’s three of them there. You can always read more about my publications on this page (linked in my top menu). I’d love to keep this shelf empty going forward, but that might not be feasible because book buying is so addicting. And hey, I’m trying to get another story published so maybe I can fill it that way!

One of the best feelings I can experience is taking a book off my TBR and moving the books after it forward, creating space at the bottom. I love this feeling! It’s a feeling of seeing physical progress of reading. I tend to do it at night when my husband can’t watch the goofy-happy look on my face.

The exception to my organization is the top two shelves of my left bookshelf. This is where I keep my signed books! The dust jacket on the upper left is a book I lent a co-worker who was fired before I could get it back. I doubt I’ll ever see it again and I ended up reading the ebook of it anyway. The rest of the top shelf is signed books I have yet to read. These are listed in TBR order as well.

The second shelf (bottom in this picture) contains my read-signed books. I’m almost out of space for them to share with the A and Bs of my read books (to the right of the big candle) so I slowly keep moving the As and Bs down to make space for read-signed books.

As you can see, I’m almost out of room! Pretty soon, I’m probably going to buy a half-bookcase which will go on the other side of the room from this one. I’m thinking of having that one house only my YA series books, mainly Harry Potter but also allowing room for The Maze Runner, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Hunger Games. Depending on space, I might include other series as well, or go with just J.K. Rowling works.

Thanks for taking this tour with me! This was really fun to write. I’ll try to buckle down and read some more with all the craziness going on in life, but I may have to find more fun reading things to post about for a bit.

Until next time, write on.

You can follow me on Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. I’m available via email at SamAStevensWriter@gmail.com. And as always, feel free to leave a comment!