Over the weekend I reorganised my bookshelf. When we moved in I was in such a distracted and lazy state that I just flung the books up there however they happened to land. But with the immenent arrival of our new couch and the preparatory rearrangements, the bookcase needed to be moved across the room. And so I asked myself: will I arrange my books by size, shape, width, alphebetically by author, alphabetically by title or according to what the book is about?

I love making piles of things. And piles of books especially. ((My geeky pencilcase-organising-kid self is really starting to show here, isn’t she?)) These are the categories I came up with:

Poetry (Pablo Neruda, Leonard Cohen)

Philosophy & Religion (Siddhartha, Tao Te Ching, Sartre)

Psychology (Freud, LaBerge & Van De Castle)

Shamanism & Altered States (McKenna, Casteneda, Huxley)

Science & Mathematics (Darwin, Hofstadter, and one of Tom’s books that looked really well beside mine – Finite Mathematics. That’s not cheating, is it?)

Favorite FemLit (Nin, Atwood)

Dark Night of the Soul Lit (Plath, Kafka)

Joyce (A category of his own, even though I couldn’t finish Ulysses. Yet.)

Classics (Hawthorne, Conrad, Woolf)

Biographies (George Sand, Baudelaire, Anne Frank)

Secondary FemLit (A.S. Byatt, Urquhart, Allende, Binchy)

Foreign Cultures (India, Irish Myths, How to be a Canadian)

PopLit (Dice Man, Douglas Coupland)

Utilities (Dictionaries, Travel Guides, Maps, Crossword Puzzles)

Boring and geeky to most, I’m sure, but hoo boy did I have fun standing amidst all my books with a bunch in my arms, exclaiming “What about the Kafka? I’ll have to make a new pile!”

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