Reorganizing My Library

I've known for quite a while that my personal library needed a major overhaul. I decided to finally tackle that this year. I started by going through all my shelves and purging books that I would never read or that I had read and didn't need to keep. I ended up giving three boxes of books to the used bookstore by my mom's house, six boxes to Goodwill, and I added a stack to my Little Free Library stash. I have to admit that I was pretty proud of this, because in the past, I found it incredibly hard to get rid of any books. I guess you just have to be in the right mood!

After purging, I decided to reorganize. I don't go all-in and alphabetize all my books or anything. That would be an insanely big project, especially with a one-year-old following behind me to undo everything I did. But I tried to loosely group books by genre or subject. And I just love the way it all turned out, so I wanted to share it here with all you fellow book nerds!

This is the shelf of my favorite books and authors, everything from C.S. Lewis to Adriana Trigiani. Not too much changed on this shelf in my reorganization process. I did demote a few books and moved them to a different shelf, and there was a stack that got promoted to this shelf. But other than that, it's the same. My favorites don't change too much. :​)

This shelf got cleared off completely, and the vast majority of the books were given away. Now it's my middle grade and young adult shelf! This is the set of shelves right next to my comfy chair. I love glancing up at it as I read. Middle grade books are the best. My only problem is that it's already full. . .​ 

The top half of this bookshelf holds my collection of travel narratives. Yeah, I have a lot. I love traveling, both in real life and vicariously. I organized these by country/continent, which means that I now know that the majority of my travel books are set in France, Italy, and the U.K. Hmm, the three European places I've been to the most. Coincidence?

The bottom two shelves hold books about books and such.

These shelves are only sort of organized. The top shelf is all my books about music (yup, music geek here). Then I have pretty, old-looking books. Then most (but not all) of the remaining books are nonfiction.

Other than the pretty, old-looking books mentioned above, these shelves hold my classics, along with some other assorted books and series that had no other place. The hole in the middle shelf is where my son pulled books from to amuse himself during this photo shoot. :​)

This is my Christian fiction section. My husband actually added a third shelf to this set of bookshelves for me, and it's still crammed full. You can barely see it, but on the second shelf, there are two horizontal books above the rest. It's the only spot in my library where that happened. Also this and the middle grade section are the spots where I'm in the most trouble if I buy new books. There is no more room, but these are the sections I'm most likely buy books for!

And finally, these two shelves are mostly fiction, sorted by author as much as possible. This is where my new acquisitions go, if they don't have an already designated section.

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So there's my library! It was so much fun to spend hours organizing it. My little guy and I would spend about an hour or so after lunch up there every day moving things around. Now he likes to stand in the middle of the room, spin in circles, and say, "Books, books, books!" :)

This wasn't quite the end of my project, either. Once everything was organized, I cataloged it all. Hee hee. I'll save that project, along with its glorious statistics, for another post!