Project: Re-Shelf Yourself - Another One Bites The Dust

Da-da dunn dunn dunn - Another one bites the dust! *Michael Jackson dance moves* Okay, let's be real - I don't have any Michael J. moves. Just way too many books. Which brings me to today's topic - how do you decide what books to get rid of?

I was actually going to write about this last week, but then my Twitter and Instagram were EXPLODING (no, not literally) with people being outraged over Marie Kondo and her apparent advice that you should only have 30 books. I don't watch her show and I haven't read her book, so I know nothing, Jon Snow.

I am, however, planning to weed out a mighty number of books as part of this big Re-Shelf Yourself project, and what I want to know from you is - how do you decide what books to get rid of? How do you decide what to keep?

I have several hundred unread books, and I know I'm trying to be realistic about which ones I *truly* want to read, and let some others (gifts, sale finds, books I won in giveaways...) go.

Then there are some that I read halfway and put down and just never picked up again (The Rook by Daniel O'Malley , The Fireman by Joe Hill, Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones) and at this point I'm like - I made it halfway through this big fat book, but I don't remember any of it. Do I pick up where I left off and just fake it til I make it? Do I give it up as lost? (And then what? Mark it DNF on Goodreads? Read? Unread?) Do I start over from the beginning? (HORRORS!)

Then there are the several hundred more books that I'm pretty sure I've read... I'm sure there are some unread ones mixed in there too, maybe? These are books I've owned since the time BG (Before Goodreads) and my brain is fried from drinking too much Diet Coke, so I look at these books and it's like

But a lot of these are sci-fi/fantasy novels, which I know I like to reread and/or loan out, so I'll likely keep these (because my husband likes to raid this stash too, and my brother borrows from it, and I can see my sons wanting to read these in another 10 years, as well as me wanting to go back to them if I ever have that ever-elusive "free time"). Romances I am usually one-and-done (unless they're super phenomenal, like Sally Thorne's The Hating Game, which I've read twice and am about ready for another re-read of, and some other authors that I love to go back to again and again) but SFF I like to go back to. So while I am likely to weed out a lot of my read romances, I'll likely hang on to a lot of my SFF. Which makes sense, since a LOT of my unread stuff is romances... I just don't have the space to hang onto all my read romances, at the rate I go through them! But I digress.

Drop me your thoughts in the comments - how do you decide what stays and what goes in your personal library? And what do you do with your books when their time with you is at an end?

Project: Re-shelf Yourself - Let's get organized

I am sloooowly making progress towards making sense of my home library. (You can read my initial post about Project: Re-shelf Yourself and see my hideous before photos here.) Right now I'm working on putting all of my whoozits and whatzits into totes and boxes so they're out of the way, and I've got friends coming on February 9th to help me pull all the books off the shelves, weed them, and put them back in their forever homes.

Before that can happen, though, I need to decide how I'm going to organize my books!

Color
I see a lot of beautiful photos of people's shelves organized by color, and while this is so visually stunning I'm left wondering - how the heck do you FIND anything? Maybe this works better for people who don't own upwards of a thousand books? o.O I kind of tried to do this with my TBR shelves and I still struggled with some of them because the spines weren't all one color (especially some historical romance titles with a sort of ombré effect).

Size
This is another aesthetic one, where you line them up by size... Again, I think this might work better for a much smaller collection than mine. I just envision the cases and cases of mass market paperbacks that are all the same size, and then what? WHERE IS THE ORGANIZATION IN THAT, I ASK YOU?!

Title or Author
In doing some Googling on ways to organize your bookshelf, I'm seeing a lot of suggestions to just straight sort by title or sort by author, with no regard to genre. This seems SO WEIRD TO ME. I absolutely plan to sort my fiction by author, once I figure out how I'm going to divide up my collection on a larger scale. I can't imagine sorting all 1,000+ books by author with no regard for fiction vs. non-fiction and etc.

Genre
Yes, it may be old school, but this is the one I'm going to go for. There are still a lot of decisions to be make - like WHICH genres and subjects to group together vs. sort out. I may need to do a whole blog post about romance novels and its sub-genres...

Read/Unread
I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not... I'm super torn about it, so if anyone has any pros/cons for me, that would be super. Part of my issue is that a good 500+ of my books are unread, and some of them I've had since long before I was on Goodreads so their read/unread status is a little fuzzy. (I have a *TERRIBLE* memory, my husband says it's from all that Diet Coke I used to drink.) So fully half of my sci-fi fantasy collection I'd be like "???" for the read/unread status. Meanwhile I have 411 books I've either been gifted or bought or pulled from my existing shelves as things I wanted to read in the ever-nebulous "soon" which I would kind of like to keep separate on an Unread shelf. But then do I also separate this unread shelf (or bookcase... or 2 bookcases... Maybe 3?) by genre as well? Because if I pull ALL of my unread books, it's going to end up being half of my collection. Do I want two collections? And do I have room to allow space in my read collection for, say, 1/3 of the read books to be shelved back in assuming I'll want to keep them after I've read them? I know sci-fi/fantasy I tend to hang on to because I'm more likely to reread or want to loan it out, while romance I rarely go back for a reread (unless it's phenomenal - I DO have a few I keep and hoard!) so I'm more likely to let them go when I'm done reading them. The verdict is still out for my on Read/Unread.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction
This one I know I'm doing, haha. I do need to decide how I'll organize within my non-fiction. Maybe I can get my librarian friends to help me... Ooh! I could look up every nonfiction book I own and find the Dewey decimal for it, get a label maker, and file them that way. *fanatic gleam flares in the eyes* AT LAST, my dreams of being a library come truuuuue!

How do you organize your books? Do you go for a method that's geared toward being more aesthetically pleasing, or toward being able to find things easily? Do you use one of these, some combo of them, or something else entirely?