Continuing with my book month theme, let’s take a look at how I categorize and tend to the collection.
When it comes to categories, I have a few. Two you already know, and they are by far my largest. That is read and unread. You would think that every book should fit into those two categories unless I am tracking books that I have started and haven’t finished—I’m a completionist so that is rarely a problem. But I actually have a few other categories. Biographies, books about music, reference materials, comic books, and more all fall outside of my normal reading and I don’t like to keep them with my fiction.
Occasionally, very occasionally, I find cause to put a book that fits into one of those other categories into my main read/unread library. A reference book that is mostly short stories and essays on those short stories? I can see a case for that. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is an autobiography, but since it’s mostly a work of fiction, where does that go? Same for Catch Me If You Can. Sometimes it all comes down to how a book hits me, how it makes me feel once I have read it. And yes, that means a book can go from being lumped into one of those other categories only to land on my read shelf once I’ve read it.
The system doesn’t have to make sense to anyone, at the end of the day, so long as it makes sense to me. Why separate them at all though? A lot of it comes down to keeping track of what I want to read/have read, and what I just want to keep on hand in case I need it or it has some sort of other value to me.
I have a collection of Perry Rhodan novels that I am working on completing, and even though they are fiction, I treat them like comic books. They are part of a collection. Though I do read them, I see them more as an oddity. I keep them together and separate because I don’t want to break the collection up between my read portion of the library and my unread bookshelf, but I also don’t want to force myself to read them all just to keep them together. For starters, I haven’t collected them all yet. Beyond that, forcing myself to read them all, one after the other, just to fulfill some sort of vision, will only result in me hating the process and the books.
How do I track all of this? Well, it is a mother of a task, and I recently went through the struggle of rebuilding my read/unread libraries digitally. With the way I keep books and how I consume them, I can’t trust myself to know what books I currently possess, and which ones I don’t, so I need access on my phone. This can be a struggle to build mostly because a lot of my books are older and predate the current ISBN system. Some of them provide enough info to build an ISBN but even then, not all of them show up, and the ones that don’t have to be manually added. The end result is I have a spreadsheet backup and a handy log on my phone. The app I tried this time is called Bookshelf on the Play Store, in case you want to try it for yourself.
Many people build these digital libraries because they want to track when they lend out a book. That’s not what I do. In fact, I never lend a book to anyone but those that live in my household. That may seem cruel, but I do it for a couple of reasons. First being, as I already said, I care for my books a lot. Even the beat-up ones. And I really only trust myself and no one else when it comes to their care. Moreover, books often take a long time to read. In that time, things get forgotten, and it’s never fun to ask for your book back. Have you ever asked for a book back from someone that insisted you never lent it to them? Been there, and it’s not worth losing a friendship over. Instead, whenever I can, I give books instead. If I really want you to read a book, I’ll just get a copy for you or even give you a copy from my library so I can have an excuse to upgrade from paperback to hardcover or from old edition to new. Might I bend or break this rule? Sure, but I’ve lost too many books to make lending the common practice and policy of my library.
Knowing your library and knowing your books is like knowing yourself. It should be no surprise then that my library has strict rules that govern what is ultimately a beautiful mess.
Quote of the Moment:
“The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
Current Reads:
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
White Plague by James Abel