I have a bit of a problem, and I’m not sure what it says about the rest of my life: I have an extremely messy bookcase. No matter how often I try and tidy it, it always seems to revert back to its original state.
As you can see here, everything is chucked around and in messy piles. This is mainly due to YALC, where I had to uproot everything to take to signings, and also for photographing book hauls and other posts. It makes me cringe to look at it! No matter how hard I try, it’s still a state.
Here is the reality: I cringe every time someone breaks the spine of a book, but I treat my books no better. There are many types of book cruelty, and I’ve cried out many a time because of fallen books from my shelves. Please, just take me to book jail now… I don’t think there’s any hope for me!
Every now and again, I have a very good tidy up and weed the books I don’t want anymore from my shelves, and pretty up the ones I do want to keep. How long does it stay pretty? A week, maximum. It frustrates me to no end, but I can’t seem to stop.
So what am I going to do to try and stop this dreadful behaviour?
- I’m going to put each book I take out of my shelf back on as soon as I’ve finished with. No more books hanging about with no purpose!
- I’ll be having a very big clean out this autumn of all the books I absolutely do not need to keep, and organising things properly, so they can easily be taken out of their slot and put back in without disturbing the other books.
- The hardest one: I will stop buying multiple copies of books, and stop buying books I absolutely know I will not read. I love buying books, but there’s always a downside!