This is part of my library. The bookcase on the right holds only Goodreads giveaway wins. This is the first bookcase that I check out when I'm trying to decide what to read (when none of the books on my TBR list are grabbing my attention that is.) These are all books that I do feel a strong urgency to read because the point of the Goodreads giveaway program is to garner reviews for the books offered. Now this isn't all my Goodreads giveaway wins, because I have several of those in my office as well since I started doing my weekly Mail Call blog posts. It's easier for me to build those posts if I have the books included next to me, and I have not gotten around to taking a lot of them downstairs to add to my shelves. The bookcase would probably be about full if I did.
The shelf on the left is full of books that I've bought at the thrift store here in Germany. I am very much a book hoarder (and darn proud of it!) If I see a book at the thrift store that even remotely captures my interest, I buy it because it probably won't be around long and they're cheap.This bookshelf at the end here also contains books that I've purchased at the thrift store. Honestly, that's most of the books that I have from here on out. This bookcase does contain several Goodreads wins as well, but only ones that I have already read and reviewed on Goodreads.
The bookcases in this picture are the only ones (besides my Goodreads bookcase), that have any sort of organization involved at this time for my adult books. The bottom shelf on the left has cookbooks (in both English and German). The bottom shelf on the right has all of the books that I bought from my thrift store in German (which is silly since I still don't know German, but I keep hoping it will provide some impetus for me to learn it.) The second shelf from the bottom on the left is my religion shelf. It's got Bibles, the Q'uran, the Bhagavad Gita, as well as religion based novels like The Left Behind series. The top shelf on the left contains all of my Stephen King novels, I guess you could call those top shelf books :) The next shelf down houses my Harry Potter collection as well as my favorite signed indie novels. And the third shelf from the right also houses cookbooks, although they are about to be boxed up and stored to make room for more thrift store books (I basically never use them anyway.)
I would like to have all of my books organized again, but I haven't found the time and the desire to do it since we last moved. When I do organize them, I will do it in a bit of a dewey decimal system, where books are grouped by genre and/or theme, and then alphabetized because I'm OCD like that (although not so OCD that not having them organized right now drives me nuts, cause it really doesn't.) It's nice having them organized though because it makes it easier to find specific books when I'm looking for them (like two months ago when I had to look through all my shelves to find Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert for book club, which would have been super easy to find had my books been better organized.)These are some of my many Goodreads wins from the office, basically all of the ones that will fit on the shelves I had free in the office in fact. Some of them are books that are on my TBR list, and that's part of the reason for their location here, because I want to keep them separate from all the other Goodreads wins as that makes them easier to find. I'd love to have them all organized so that the spines are visible, but I've found I can fit more books on the shelves if I don't do that. Making the best use of the space has become more important than displaying them unfortunately.
This concludes the adult book section of my bookcases. Now we will move on to my children's books, which I actually have slightly more organized than my books. I have three bookcases in the dining room (it's where they fit, and where at least one was needed for our school books) that hold books, although the bookcases aren't entirely dedicated to books. I keep the books on the shelves that are actually accessible to the children. I think you can tell just by looking at this shelf that I group books in series together, at least some, although I do have some rearranging to do in order to add some books that already have series starters pictured on shelves that have no more room for new books. Luckily, I have an almost entirely empty shelf right above the top shelf in this photo that I can add books to.
As you have probably noticed, if you've seen my thrift store haul photos on Facebook at least, I buy a lot more children's books than I do for myself at the thrift store now. I am really hoping that my children will love reading as much as I do, but they're not old enough to fully express opinions on what they're going to want to read in the next few years, so I buy books in just about any series that seems like it might appeal to at least one of my children, or books in series that I loved as a child. The Goosebumps Horrorland books are definitely because I hope my children will love them too like I did, but even if they don't, having the books again will be worth it for when I want to take a trip down memory lane. I also have a whole mess of Babysitter's Little Sister books (although nowhere near the whole series) because I loved those books as a child and hope that at least my daughter will enjoy them when she learns how to read. I've also got a good start on the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series because it's my understanding that those books appeal to boys, and I have one of those too. It's a little bit harder for me to pick out books that I think my son will like because I was never a little boy, and it does seem like there are more series out there targeted more towards girls (even though I truly believe there is no such thing as boy books and girl books, I do understand that children will have different opinions on that matter.)
This bookcase holds all of the emergent or beginning reader books that we own. The books with the reader level generally clearly listed in the upper right hand corner of the cover. Because I truly want to help my children love to read, I have bought every single one of these books that has seemed the least bit interesting, or that features characters that they like even a little bit, that I have found at the thrift store and at our PX (where our bookstore is located.) The bottom two shelves are almost entirely full of these books, and the third shelf from the bottom has several different series of books that are supposed to be read in number order for young readers. I feel like I have a pretty impressive collection of them that I will likely never get rid of, even when my children are in high school, because one day they will have children of their own and then I can pass them down to my grandchildren.
And my final bookcase is the linen closet that is located right outside the kids bedrooms. We don't have a ton of linens, and the ones we do have all fit in the linen closet that is located outside the master bedroom, so I converted this closet into a place to store children's books. It just makes sense. I had this closet full of books right away and had to employ some creative shelving in order to fit all of the children's books that we owned when we moved onto the shelves. I tried to keep the books that the children really aren't ready for reading independently on higher shelves, leaving the board books and other small readers lower for easier access for them. As much as it sometimes annoys me, I always love it when one of my children randomly brings me a book and asks me to read to them. I do need to do some organizing between these shelves and the ones in the dining room, because I have some books from series that are primarily located in the dining room on these shelves, and I really need to go through and get rid of any duplicates that I surely have purchased (because it's really hard to keep track of numbers in series when you're buying from so many. I should make a list on my phone.)So there you have it. Basically all of my bookshelves. If you didn't believe me before about books being my life, I'm pretty sure you probably will now :) Feel free to drop a shelfie or two of your own over on the Facebook page. I love seeing other people's shelves. - Katie
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