The Extra Cool Group! (of people Michael is experimenting on) discussion

In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Obviously, the way you classify your collection of books is a window into what you care about. I often think about that Borges excerpt when I look at people's bookshelves.

How do you classify your books? And why do you do it that way? Do you have any rules of what books go where? Any kind of internal logic to the shelves that you have created?

For me: I create a shelf for every country... usually the country is where the author is from but there are some rare cases, like the nonfiction book written by a Frenchman but was a completely about the northern Canadian eskimos (Kabloona) where I shelved it as Canada.

I hope to one day read one book from every country.

I also have some random shelves like "walking" where I shelve all the books about walking, wandering, etc: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/...

And I also shelve all books with either male/female based on its author. This is so that I can easily calculate my ratio. The same with novels/poetry/nonfiction, etc.

I definitely make connections between books, but haven't gotten into shelving yet. I usually take the time in a review to make connections to certain authors, usually well known ones rather than obscure ones.

I just use the boring categories, like genre, and subject for non-fiction. I also have shelves for books I read in 2009 and 2010 (before that I can't remember)

Mine are pretty basic but probably only make sense to me... I label them by:

- the year I read them (I know Goodreads can do this now, but I like labeling it myself)

- the audience (adult, teen, kid, all of them, some of them)

- where I got the book (ajpl - my library, courier - my library's courier system, own - mine, ill - interlibrary loan)

- the subject/genre/whatever (horror, scifi, mystery, and thanks Caris for publishing his book and letting me make a bizarro shelf)

- and some special ones... if I recommend it it goes on the recommended shelf, if it really really affected me it goes on my threw-me-for-a-loop shelf, if it's a Neil Gaiman book it goes on the gaiman shelf, if I read it for work it goes on the work shelf.

I used to do boring ones like just favorite. Then I started to delve into fetishes and that was that.

I've increasingly tried to give my shelves names that attract attention and aren't boring. I've also added shelves that are specifically "vote whoring," or "user aimed," depending on how you look at them: shelves for reviews that lots of people like, shelves for reviews that haven't gotten any votes but I like, and a shelf for my worst reviews. There's no literary merit for these shelves: they're purely for people browsing my reviews.

But, because it's important to me, I also classify books by the time period they were written. I tend to look at literature more by how it has evolved than by where it was written, although I see value in both.

I shelf geographically as well, Michael. And sometimes by time period - Rome is different from Italy.

I shelve by country too.

I use to have a lot of different shelves based on psychological themes in books but I never used them again after I made them so I deleted them all. I think that there are similarities to books written in the same culture, so I like knowing what country a book came from and whether I like or dislike that country as a rule.

I also have more exclusive shelves than a lot of people. I have to-read and want separated (not perfectly though) so I know what books I haven't bought or just saw (like I said a good number of these are incorrectly just on to-read and some I have bought didn't move over, there isn't good upkeep on those shelves). I also have partially read and I think a couple others that all exist because I don't think about all books the same, something marked as partially read is something I would consider going back to usually, whereas something marked as read could be something I didn't finish because I didn't like it. Usually partially read, I forgot where I put the book or got distracted.


****
In real life I sort first by read vs. unread then by genre, until they get mixed up again which happens quickly, I also have a soon to read section.

I haven't really gotten the hang of the shelf thing. My shelves look like an n-dimensional matrix gone wrong. I imagine a nice, neat tidy book case, and instead just as I've lined up some books on one shelf, I realise some of them belong on a different shelf. So then my shelves run vertically and not horizontally as I try to line the books on top of each other on their respective shelves. Then a new tag strikes me and the shelves start tilting diagonally. That's just the 2-D aspect. You get my drift.

wow.. i am lame..
i have read, currently reading, borrowed, etc.

i but i do not tag books either.. i find both tasks frustrating and mundane and can never seem to do anything there.. even though i envy other peoples clouds...

I shelve by country, sometimes by author, by subject, by genre. I try to do that because my physical shelves at home are not that neat. I only use author shelves if I really, really like the author.

I also noticed that the longer I'm here, the more shelves I add.

Read, and To Read.

i think some of my shelf names are only meaningful to me. some of them are smiths lyrics. i try to group them thematically, but i have largely abandoned them. i should make new ones and take some time to reconfigure them. they have become untidy.

I used to have weird bookshelf tags, but it was too much, and served no real function. So novels, short stories, and non-fic are my mains. If you have over 1000 books or so, loadsa tags is wise.

My shelving system is pretty much just about what will help me use the books and see connections between them. My shelves are sometimes superprecise and sometimes quite broad. Science fiction & fantasy, for instance, could certainly be made more precise, but then I would have to spend time deciding where each new SF/F book I read went and remembering what decision I'd made when I needed to find it.

Many of my shelves are directly related to the kinds of courses I teach - I have American, British, and world literature separated out - but then I also have shelves for Scandinavian fiction and Canadian fiction. I have shelves for parts of the world (India, the Arctic and Africa, for instance), but only if I've read enough books about or from those areas to make it seem worthwhile. I also have shelves for genres (SF/F as mentioned above, horror, mystery, romance), eras (e.g., 20th century American), areas of study (disability studies, feminism/gender/sexuality), literary subsets (e.g., African American literature and Native American literature), broad subjects (literary theory, history, religion/atheism), and far more specific subjects (utopia, apocalypse, nonviolence, zombies).

For me, more is definitely better, and most of my books belong to multiple shelves in order to give me the most information when I look over my books.

I use to shelve by year till goodreads learned to sort that for me. I love that function

Sometimes the right shelf name can save a person from actually having to write a "proper" review. My difficulty is that, although I have made many virtual shelves, I've been too lazy to actually assign the appropriate books to them. Kind of the reverse problem to what happens with my physical books (too many books, too few shelves. always too few shelves. never enough shelves. I was delusional to think the kindle would solve this problem. and now I have become the kind of person who splits infinitives. it wasn't supposed to be this way...

Jasmine wrote: "I use to shelve by year till goodreads learned to sort that for me. I love that function"

by year that you read the book, or year that the book was published?

For read books, I just have shelves for each year (for the date I read the book) and one for first reads. Plus one for books I abandoned and one for abridgments and radio adaptations, which I only ever use if I really, really want to review the book.

For to-read books, a bunch of shelves showing which are or aren't available in various library systems. I also have one for teaching books and one for audiobooks that I have, but haven't listened to yet. One called "of interest" that is really just books that were on my Amazon wishlist when I imported years ago - some I thought other people might like as gifts etc.

My shelves are very functional but not very interesting and only of use to me.

Jason wrote: "Jasmine wrote: "I use to shelve by year till goodreads learned to sort that for me. I love that function"

by year that you read the book, or year that the book was published?"
that I read, it has never occurred to me to sort by year it's published

I organize it by
a-(important categories I want accessed first)
b-(topics that I'm interested in such as vampires, werewolves, dystopian, apocalypse, etc.)
genre-(genres)
z-(authors organized by last name).

Some kind of metaphysic that even I don't understand. Genre and theme and target audience and whether I finished it, and a quite a bit of the inexplicable in between.

I have broad categories and I also track when I finished a book. I don't have any classifications for my TBR pile.

I used the bookshelves as tags, putting as many for a book as I can think of. There is no clear system, even though I started to us Goodreads as a catalogue. I classify books by language, by topic, by genre, by my feelings towards it, and by anything else I need. - I try to make sure that every bookshelf has several titles in it and not stay empty.

I shelve by what I would look for, and what I think others would look for.

Also, book club books, audio books, and books I've read aloud... so I can remember.

I have some normal genre shelves (kids and YA, history, etc), shelves that reveal what I thought about a book ("the movie is better", "ugh", "all time favorites", etc), and the shelves that are for personal record-keeping, such as my assigned reading shelf (where I also try to record the class I read the book for) and my shelf for books that come from the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

Also if I notice that I'm reading a lot of a certain genre, I'll add an appropriate shelf. After taking a poetry class I now have a Poetry shelf, and this semester when I noticed how many mystery novels I was reading I made a shelf for those.

My shelves are very cut and dry: horror, teen, regional, biographies, etc. I'm not complicated and neither are my shelves.

For me, reading and book collecting are separate hobbies. While I use GR generally, and reviews specifically, for both hobbies, I use the shelf system primarily for collecting. I have a shelf for fiction and literature which mentions the game of Go, for example, and one for fiction which is more substantially about the game. I also have a shelf labelled just "Go" with a few items duplicated from the other two, but mostly with "regular" Go books [i.e. how to play the game and the like]. I also have one shelf for an association of French authors whose work I collect and one for works related to a particular book group in which I am active. I have a shelf for authors from my home town. Some day I will add shelves for the many political and labor-related books I read and/or collect.

Whoa, Brian R. I'm rabbit-trailing this thread a minute. I just want to put in that I LOVE go and it's the only game I play.

I wish I had a go bookshelf. Unfortunately it'd only have like... 3 books.

Two bays, each 12' x 10' and formed of 3 pods. The middle pod is wider than the other two, which are equal. In Bay A, the middle pod has one fewer shelf than the others, and also the only extended-height shelf. In Bay B, all pods have the same number of shelves.

Height restrictions mean that the topmost shelves in both bays are used to hold mass-market papaerbacks, the only things that will fit. Mass-markets are not allowed on other shelves, because they are ugly, break up a shelf's aesthetics too much, tend to get beat up, tend to be my oldest (in terms of acquisition date) books, and are otherwise generally unloved. Likewise, oversized books can only go on the oversized shelf. I have only two of these currently -- the Oxford English Dictionary (Condensed), 2nd Edition, and a gigantic book of Hubble pictures called "Cosmos".

Subjects are grouped within pods, rather than crossing pods to be grouped along shelves. An attempt has been made to have subjects "flow" into each other; together with pod-grouping, this prefers my own sorting rather than, say, DDS or LLC indexing. I feel this to be the weakest aspect of my system, since it's a large non-standard, controversial wad of information in what's otherwise a fairly streamlined axiom scheme.

In a divergence from standard indexing practices, I sort biographies, memoirs and autobiographies directly into their appropriate subjects. I find this vastly preferable to a distinct biography section.

All subjects are sorted by author, subsorted (if necessary and appropriate) by translator, and finally subsorted by date of *that edition's* or *that translation's* publication.

Subject breakdown, proceeding top to bottom in all bays, mass-market topshelf ignored in all cases:

Bay A, Left Pod: 3x shelves American Literature. 1x shelf American History. 1.5x shelves Military History, including the Holocaust, with .5 shelves of Sociology and History-of-Events-In-My-Lifetime. Grabbag shelf of large bargain hardbacks of the "Art of the World" and "World Religions" sort, Encyclopedia of Animal Life (9 volumes), Jacques Cousteau's Marine Encyclopedia (20 volumes), Life Science, Financial/Investing. .5x shelves of Sports History. 1.5x shelves of General History.

Bay A, Middle Pod: 1x shelf broken into Religious-Texts-of-the-World-No-Matter-How-Ludicrous (thus the Satanic Bible and something calling itself the Necronomicon find their home alongside the
القرآن‎ and the New International Version; I figure they'll fight it out amongst themselves, and I'll worship whichever wins), Philosophy-Including-Philosophy-of-Science, and Books-About-Drugs-Which,-If-Not-Placed-So-High,-Will-(history-shows)-Regrettably-Be-Stolen-or-at-Least-Loaned-Out-While-I'm-Too-High-To-Remember-To-Whom-I-Lent-Them. 2x shelves of Unamerican-Literature-Written-in-English, broken down into Canada, Ireland (but see JAMES JOYCE FETISH, below), Great Britain, South Africa, India, Trans-Tasman, Exiled, Beckett-Writing-in-English and Nabokov-Writing-in-English (ya bastards). 1x shelf pop science (but see NUCLEAR WEAPONS FETISH, below). The next shelf is the aforementioned oversized; next to the OED sit my nuclear weapons fetish, a collection of books related to nuclear weapons and those scientists primarily known for weaponeering (this means: Oppenheimer, Teller, Ted Taylor, Sakharov, and Szilard. This excludes: Einstein, Fermi, Bethe, Feynman, and -- by default -- everyone else not listed previously). .5x shelf James Joyce fetish, including 4 different copies of Ulysses. .5x shelf Literary Criticism. 1x shelf Collected-Works-and-Combined-Novels-Usually-Listed-as-Bargain-Editions.

Bay A, Right Pod aka THE POD OF ETERNAL RIGOR (everything must be an authentic textbook, ie contain either equations or code set off by their own fonts): 1x shelf useless/embarrassing computer science and manuals -- most of these I've had since I was a teenager. 1x shelf of Language- or Technology-Specific Programming, partially-subsorted by abstraction of the language and thus Assembly Languages (subsorted by architecture), C, C++, shell, ML, Lisp, Haskell, SmallTalk, Java, Prolog, Pthreads, RPC and finally OpenMP (there's also a lone Perl book, but I don't much like to talk about that). .75x shelves of grabbag science: Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, Nuclear Physics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, dominated by Nuc-E, followed by .25x shelves of Cryptography (applied and theoretical). 1x shelf of Theoretical Computer Science and the King's College Texts in Computer Science series. 1x shelf of Mathematics, sorted into Logic (all the way up to Category Theory etc), Combinatorics, Prob/Stats, Algebra, Analysis, Number Theory, and Numerical Analysis. 3x shelves of the hardest of hardcore computer science.

that's enough for now. i can cover bay b some other time if you'd like.

this thread makes me feel inferior... I separate the books I've read from the ones I haven't. Sort of... mostly...

Nick wrote: "Two bays, each 12' x 10' and formed of 3 pods. The middle pod is wider than the other two, which are equal. In Bay A, the middle pod has one fewer shelf than the others, and also the only extended-..."

Awww fuck I forgot the shelf of Translated Literature (1x shelf, middle pod Bay A, following Unamerican-Literature-in-English). This is broken up into Russian, Spanish-from-Spain, Spanish-from-Mexico-and-Central-America, Spanish-from-South-America, African-nonEnglish, Indian-nonEnglish, French, Italian, German-Germany and German-not-Germany. whew!

hey what is in the spanish from spain section?

I have a lot of trouble finding authors who've been translated

Jasmine wrote: "hey what is in the spanish from spain section?"

Don Quixote.

Nick wrote: "Jasmine wrote: "hey what is in the spanish from spain section?"

Don Quixote."

Whether or not this is my own private joke regarding personal prejudices about the Kingdom of Spain and its influence on the novel is left as an exercise for the reader.

I'm going with joke, cause I can think of better, but you know time moves slower over there and so does the plot of their books.

Jasmine wrote: "I'm going with joke, cause I can think of better, but you know time moves slower over there and so does the plot of their books."

give me some recommendations! i literally know of no other spanish novelists than mr. cervantes.

david truba is really really great
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72...

there is this really old catholic book about religion called dark night of the soul by st john of the cross

I've been reading one called only one thing missing which is like a spanish version of dan brown for months now, but really as a culture they lack any desire to get to the point so I'm reading it rather slowly.

They looooves them some Paul Auster and Ken Follett in Spain. That might count.

I liked reading the Mafalda comics.

ha.

if you search spanish authors you get all the chili/argentina guys. I ended up going to the part of the library of congress system in my library for spanish books, taking the first 10 I could find translated and googling the authors to see who was from spain.

I'm a librarian, I have LOTS of shelves.

I separate out the fiction from the nonfiction, I shelve books by age level and by genre, and by my own categories. Those can be as basic as "favorites" or for my own amusement, such as "blood-sucking fiends."

I hadn't thought of shelving books by country, nor do I have a shelf for Go books. But at home, my nonfiction is in Dewey Decimal order, which I am absurdly proud of.

Philip wrote: "Whoa, Brian R. I'm rabbit-trailing this thread a minute. I just want to put in that I LOVE go and it's the only game I play.

I wish I had a go bookshelf. Unfortunately it'd only have like....."

In real life, you need more Go books. I'd suggest the websites GoDiscussions.com and Sensei's Library for good suggestions. Here on GR, if you don't have a go shelf I always welcome comments and info on the reviews on my shelves.

I'd try to emulate Jackie's system, but unfortunately very few go books involve blood sucking fiends, while my go nonfiction would be too tightly clustered on the DDS to shelve in order; besides, most go books are from a small number of specialty publishers who helpfully number their books.

I hadn't thought of shelving books by country, nor do I have a shelf for Go books. But at home, my nonfiction is in Dewey Decimal order, which I am absurdly proud of.

Fifteen cool points! You're now winning the illustrious cool points contest, Jackie.

oh goddamnit, i just realized you meant goodreads shelves. well, you can go see my goodreads shelves, or write a script to harvest them, blah. and i don't think i can link directly to my comment, k-crappy :/. goodreads fail!

Haha. Nick, I thought you were just being a wordy, nerdy, smartass when you posted those three huge paragraphs about your physical bookshelves.

I was intimidated into silence. My only consolation is that my OReilly animal books are all sorted by color.

no your actual shelves are totally awesomely cool, I'm glad you talked about them.

before I moved i had piles cause I didn't have enough shelves.

Fiction, science fiction, comics, biography, philosophy (and essays), psychology with a specific piles for borderline and sociopathy, history, religion with a specific pile for buddhism.

now it's more anywhere I can find to put books and probably over christmas break I'll go through and sort them. I might sort of follow jackie but use library of congress.

Nick, your description of your shelves was awesome. Thanks for that. It reminded me of those passages in the old testament about how to build the ark or something.

Jasmine wrote: "before I moved i had piles cause I didn't have enough shelves"

oh trust me, i've been there. i finally bought a place this summer, and set immediately to building these. so happy!

yay!!!

I just moved into an apartment with a ton of storage, but I broke a shelf when I moved in so I'm freaked about overloading stuff and technically I'm not suppose to buy any more furniture