Your second shelf

Walk to your bookcase. Gaze at the second shelf (the first one seems too likely to have miscellaneous, non-book contents). List the author/books, left to right.

I'm crossing my fingers, and hoping this yields some oddball, interesting, and conversation-starting examples, and puts people on the scent of books they might not be familiar with or had forgotten existed.

. The bookshelf in this room has three shelves, all double-deep with paperbacks, stacked laying on their sides instead of standing upright because more fit that way. The second shelf alone has nearly a hundred books on it.

Just from here I can see

• Marion Zimmer Bradley:
  • The Fall of Atlantis
  • Hawkmistress
  • Web of Darkness
  • The Heritage of Hastur
  • Star of Danger
• Fritz Lieber:
  • Swords Against Wizardry
  • Swords in the Mist
• Robert Heinlein
  • Revolt in 2100
  • Glory Road
• Diane Duane: The Wounded Sky
• James Thurber: Fables for Our Time
• Desmond Morris: The Naked Ape
• Grace Ingram: Red Adam's Lady
• John Morrisey: The Questing of Kedrigern
• Douglas Adams: The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul
• Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier
• Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders
• Emil Petaja: The Stolen Sun
• Johnny Hart: The Wizard's Back (a Wizard of Id collection)
• C L Moore: Northwest Smith
• Tolkien: The Hobbit
• Lewis: Prince Caspian
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Marble Faun
• E.T.A. Hoffman: Tales of Hoffman
• Larry Niven: Tales of Known Space

Is that second from the bottom, from the top, left, right... which room?

From where I'm sitting, I can see:

• Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
• Soul Music by Terry Pratchett
• A dictionary
• A Bible
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanna Clarke
• Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny
• House of Suns by Alastair Reyolds
• Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds
• Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
• Thud by Terry Pratchett
• The Hot Gate by John Ringo
• Tokyo Babylon Omnibus Volume 1 by CLAMP
• Some random DV Ds and for some reason the 5th anniversary collection of the Devil May Cry games.

That's kind of a random assortment of books.

I dunno ... whatever gives the most interesting/entertaining/instructive results? For my part, I'll probably use the second-from-the-top shelf of my biggest bookcase when I get home tonight.

From the bottom, you pretty much guessed that the first shelf contains random crap. Second shelf from the bottom contains my to-read queue, which includes:

• "Matilda", Roald Dahl (borrowed from a friend)
• "Emma", Jane Austen
• "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald (half-read)
• "Robert's Rules of Writing" (actually almost finished)
• "Mouseguard, Labyrinth, and Other Stories" (read parts of it)
• "Hollow Earth", Barrowman and Barrowman (also half-read)
• "The Warlock's Shadow", Stephen Deas
• "Attachments", Rainbow Rowell

I have two bookshelves in my room. The one I can easily see has:

• Three Norton Anthologies
  • The Romantic Period
  • The Victorian Age
  • The Twentieth Century and After
• The Motorcycle Diaries from Ernesto "Che" Guevara
• Bionicle Chronicles
  • #1 Tale of the Toa
  • #2 Beware the Bohrok
  • #3 Makuta's Revenge
• An annotated translation of Beowulf
• Catch-22
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Hoot by Carl Hiaasen
• The Book of John Mandeville
• Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen
• Ghost Canoe by Will Hobbs
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• To Live by Yu Hua
• The Complete Problem Sleuth printed editions
  • #1 Compensation Adequate
  • #2 This is Complete Bullshit
  • #3 Suitor to the Sodajerk's Confidante
  • #4 Black Liquid Sorrow
  • #5 Sepulchritude
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Most of my Redwall books, by Brian Jacques
  • Redwall
  • Mossflower
  • Mattimeo
  • Mariel of Redwall
  • Salamandastron
  • Martin the Warrior
  • The Bellmaker
  • Outcast of Redwall
  • Pearls of Lutra
  • The Long Patrol
  • Marlfox
  • The Legend of Luke
  • Lord Brocktree

Hmmm. I need more shelves for my books.

edited 31st Jul '14 10:32:13 AM by AnSTH

In whatever order I find them sitting:

• House Of Leaves, Mark Danielewski (non-colour version)
• The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, J.R.R. Tolkien
• How Not To Write A Novel, Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark
• The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty
• A Little Book of Language, David Crystal
• The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
• Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
• Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
• Black Mass, John Gray
• My Work Is Not Yet Done, Thomas Ligotti
• There Are Little Kingdoms, Kevin Barry
• The Inheritors, William Goldman
• Audition, Ryu Murakami
• Teach Yourself German
• A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, James Joyce
• The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Fall of the House of Usher and Others, Edgar Allan Poe
• Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon
• The Essential Kabbalah, Daniel C. Matt
• The Essential Zohar, Rav P.S. Berg
• Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Volume III
• The Ondt and the Gracehoper, James Joyce

What surprises me looking at this is how many I've half-read and still haven't gotten back to.

Staring at mine:

• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• William Faulkner:
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • The Hamlet
  • Light in August
  • Absalom, Absalom!
  • As I Lay Dying
• Henry Fielding:
  • Joseph Andrews
  • Tom Jones
• Jack Finney, Time and Again
• F. Scott Fitzgerald:
  • The Great Gatsby
  • This Side of Paradise
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• C.S. Forester, Lord Hornblower
• Gabriel García Márquez:
  • La Mala hora
  • Cien años de soledad
• Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Drowning Duck
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
• Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
• Nikolai Gogol', Mjortvyje dushi
• Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
• H. Rider Haggard:
  • King Solomon's Mines
  • She
• Thomas Hardy:
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge
  • Jude the Obscure
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22
• Frances Hodgson Burnett:
  • The Secret Garden
  • A Little Princess
  • Little Lord Fauntleroy
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
• James Joyce:
  • Dubliners
  • Ulysses
  • Finnegans Wake
• Franz Kafka:
  • Der Prozeß
  • Gesammelte Werke
  • In der Strafkolonie
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
• C.S. Lewis:
  • Out of the Silent Planet
  • Perelandra
  • That Hideous Strength
  • The Great Divorce
  • Till We Have Faces
  • The Chronicles of Narnia (7 vols.)
• Thomas Ligotti:
  • Songs of a Dead Dreamer
  • Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
  • Teatro Grottesco
• H.P. Lovecraft:
  • The Dunwich Horror and Others
  • At the Mountains of Madness and Other Stories
  • Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
• Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk
• Catherine Marshall, Christy
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
• Herman Melville:
  • Bartleby the Scrivener and Other Tales
  • Benito Cereno
  • Billy Budd, Sailor
  • Moby-Dick
• Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
• Vladimir Nabokov:
  • Bend Sinister
  • Lolita
• Patrick O'Brian:
  • Master and Commander
  • Post Captain

(Yes, I'm an anal-retentive nimrod who not only alphabetizes his stuff, but has separate sections for fiction, poetry, reference, philosophy, science, criticism, ad nauseam)

edited 31st Jul '14 8:18:22 PM by Jhimmibhob

^Much the same. Thus:

• J Pod - Douglas Coupland
• Matilda - Roald Dahl
• The Fifty Year Sword - Mark Z. Danielewski
• House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
• No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
• Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
• The Count of Monte-Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
• Baudolino - Umberto Eco
• The Island of the Day Before - Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
• Middlemarch - George Eliot
• Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Pale Companion - Philip Gooden
• I, Claudius - Robert Graves
• Claudius the God - Robert Graves

• Anne Ursu—The Shadow Thieves
• Percy Jackson bk 1 (signed)
• Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men
• Rowan of the Wood —Eathan Rose
• The Tain
• O R Melling's The Hunter's Moon
• Italian Folktales—Italo Calvino

I'll stop there. the whole shelf is about 25-40?? books all either based in mythologies or fairy tales. I will post the full list later but my head hurts.

Second shelf from the top has no books (only games), but second shelf from the bottom has a few.

• Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson
  • The Path of Daggers
  • Winter's Heart
  • Crossroads of Twilight
  • Knife of Dreams
  • The Gathering Storm
  • Towers of Midnight
  • A Memory of Light
• Dawn of the Bunny Suicides - Andy Riley
• Berlitz Japanese-English (and E-J) dictionary
• Ignobel Prizes - Marc Abrahams
• Collins Scrabble Dictionary
• Max Overacts: Volume One "Hold on to your Stubs" - Caanan Grall
• Personality Types - Riso/Hudson
• Goosebumps: The Cuckoo Clock of Doom - RL Stine

It's not a particularly wide shelf.

I actually don't technically have any bookshelves, exactly, in my room at all.

But my night table is stuffed with books, and the foot of my bed has a shelf/mirror thing that I filled with books and has big towers of books on top (which can and do fall over, sometimes).

Most of my books are lined around my room though, the walls have a built-in little shelfy thing thatg sticks on two of my walls. Totally full.

Outside of my room a handful of my books are in a bonafide bookshelf, but there's a lot crap around the room we haven't gotten rid of yet, so it's really hard to get to.

Oh, and my closet has some books in it too, on the top and the side.

High five!

High five!

Someone's a busy bee,

High five!

High five!

I have three shelves, which one am I supposed to do?

Oh, whichever one strikes you as most interesting, instructive, or revealing. The only reason I specifically didn't ask for the first shelf is because so many folks' first shelves seem partly dedicated to miscellaneous reading matter, magazines, DVDs, and bric-a-brac.

edited 19th Aug '14 9:25:19 AM by Jhimmibhob

I have a set of shelves for miscellaneous fiction (the one I posted), a set for spec-fic, another set for essays/poems/plays/philosophy, a general non-fiction shelf, a shelf for medical textbooks, a shelf for other textbooks, and the top of a set of drawers for art books. All in all, I have ~500 books in my bedroom, so I just chose the shelf which I felt was most indicative of my general fiction taste.

A question: for those people who do not organise their bookshelf by author surname, how do you keep track of where your books are?

edited 19th Aug '14 8:32:11 PM by Yuanchosaan

Most of my books are in ebook form and moving a lot made me cut down to what i considered my essential paper books.

My second shelf has some spicy ones:

• Ringworld - Larry Niven
• The Ringworld Engineers - Larry Niven
• The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven
• Childhood's End - Arther C Clarke
• Sourcery - Terry Pratchett
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• The Areas of my Expertise - John Hodgman
• City of Saints and Madmen - Jeff Vandermeer
• Beyond this Horizon - Robert A Heinlein
• Gold - Isaac Asimov
• Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov
• The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K Le Guin
• Iron Council - China Mieville (my favourite book of all time)
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (i was very disappointed by this book, i expected it to be much better from its reputation)

Its not organized in any way whatsoever.

edited 19th Aug '14 8:45:44 PM by mrshine

I don't organize by author surname unless it's a series or set (so all of my Nero Wolfes are on one shelf, as are all my Brother Cadfaels, but Jerry Pournelle's stuff is on several different shelves.) I tend to either not organize much at all, or organize by subject. Although some of them are organized by size — the oversized and coffee-table type books are all on just a few of the shelves so that those shelves are the only ones that have to be set at that height. And I have 126 linear feet of bookshelves, so mostly I go by "I know I've got it, it should be somewhere around... Oh, there it is."

edited 19th Aug '14 9:24:24 PM by Madrugada

I organize by subject, and I don't have anywhere near enough books in any one subject or genre that I can't just stare at the shelf and see it after a few seconds.

My second shelf is, now that I'm looking at it, kinda weird. And also doubles as my WWI overflow shelf.

• Hyrule Historia
• "Digger" by Ursula Vernon
• "Maus" by Art Spiegelman
• "Chronicles of the Black Company" by Glen Cook
• a translation of Gilgamesh
• "Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography" by Robert Graves
• "The Book of Cthulhu" edited by Ross E Lockhart
• "Cucumber Quest" 1 and 2 by Gigi D.G.
• "Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War" by Peter Barham (the driest, must uninteresting book ever about such an interesting topic)
• "The Android's Dream" by John Scalzi
• "The Line Between", "We Never Talk About My Brother", "The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzhe", and "Tamsin" by Peter S. Beagle
• "The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear" by Walter Moers
• "Dare Call It Treason" by Richard M. Watt
• "The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War' by Peter Englund
• "Mindfulness in Plain English" by Bhante Henepola Gunarantana
• "The Buddha Walks Into a Bar" by Lodro Rinzler
• "Sister Emily's Lightship" by Jane Yolen
• "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by Haruki Murakami
• "Nanny Ogg's Cookbook" by Terry Pratchett
• "Astroboy", first omnibus by Osamu Tezuka
• "The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
• "Lamb" by Christopher Moore
• "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis

edited 19th Aug '14 9:53:49 PM by Bur

Interesting title.

Is this about what I think it is about?

Second Shelf:

• Sherman, Fighting Prophet - Llyod Lewis
• Memoirs - General William T. Sherman
• Grant Moves South - Bruce Catton
• Ulysses S. Grant - Geoffrey Perret
• Grant - Jean Edward Smith
• Campaigning With Grant - Horace Porter
• Grant's Final Victory - Charles Flood
• Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War - Charles Flood
• The Grand Design, Strategy and the US Civil War - Donald Stroker
• A House Divided, A Century of Great Civil War Quotes - Edward L. Ayers
• Hardtack and Coffee - John Billings
• War from the Inside - Frederick Hitchcock
• The Passing of the Armies - Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
• Mosby's Memoirs - John Mosby
• This Republic is Suffering, Death and the American Civil War - Drew G. Faust
• Why the Confederacy Lost - Gabor S. Boritt
• Lost Triumph: Lee's Real Plan at Gettsyburg and Why it Failed - Tom Carhart
• High Tide at Gettysburg - Glenn Tucker
• Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer - James L. Swanson
• Free at Last, A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War - Ira Berlin
• Fort Stedman to Reconstruction - Shelby Foote
• Blue Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw - Russell Duncan
• The Fall of the House of Dixie - Bruce Levine
• April 1865: The Month that Saved America - Jay Wink

edited 19th Aug '14 10:22:24 PM by Parable

Currently, in my hometown after Graduation and before Post-Grad. For the duration of my stay, my stuff is split between two places, so you all get an electic mix of old and new. A few of these are unread or partially read.

• Yearbooks & Graduation photos.
• Hume, a collection of critical essays.
• The Vinland Saga
• Supreme Commander 2 Instruction Manual
• Personal Identity (Blackwell Readings in Philosophy)
• Complete Works of Plato (Hackett, Upsidedown for some reason)
• Modern Irish Poetry, An Anthology
• Lady Gregory's Complete Irish Mythology
• The State as a Work of Art
• Bulfinch's Mythology (Arthur & Charlemagne)
• The Hobbit
• Asgard Saga
• Maupassant, Contes de la Becasse
• Mill, a collection of Critical Essays
• The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
• A Pocket Treasure of Irish Verse
• The Rationalists (An Anthology)
• The Empiricists (Similarly, an Anthology)
• A Farewell to Arms
• Paradise Lost
• Michael Collins (Part 1&2, a biography)
• The Prince and Other Works (Machivelli)
• The Labyrith and Other Stories (Borges)
• The Exile and the Kingdom
• The Fear of Knowledge
• Candide (1930s original french publication, damaged severely in the spine)
• A DVD of Waking Life

The Tao of Pooh is, indeed, about Winnie.

@The Knowing Where Books Are; Usually, I just read along the spine. I know the rough size and colour of the books I need and usually I can spot it pretty quick. In more permenant residence though, I try to divide roughly by Genre [Philosophy, Other Academic (Political and Psychological Essays, usually), Existential Philosophy/Philosophical Fiction, Poetry, Classic Lit and General Reads]. It's a bit rough still, but usually I'll spot it with only a quick glance over.

edited 19th Aug '14 10:42:36 PM by Fauxlosophe

Got pointed here by Parable. The bookcase in my room isn't actually mine; it's my sister's, who has moved out and not yet come to take the bookcase.

I keep my own stuff on the shelves in my closet, but I don't really keep books, so I'm not sure which would qualify for this thread... I'll take a look at my sister's bookcase and see what's on the second shelf, since I'm not actually sure.

Okay I've got:

• Complete Solutions Manual for Mc Keague's Prealgebra Fifth Edition by Sheryl W. Sippel.
• Vegetarian Times Cookbook by the editors of Vegetarian Times.
• Betty Crocker's Cookbook, which does not confirm if it was actually written by Betty Crocker.
  • There's a whole number of really small cookbook pamphlet things.
• Salamandastron by Brian Jacques.
• Outcast of Redwall by Brian Jacques.

That's actually all that's on there besides a little zipup book case which I'm pretty sure holds a bible. (Not checking out of respect for my sister's stuff.) I remember she did come and take some of the books, which is why there's not much on it.

EDIT: Should I post stuff that's on my own shelves, even though it's not books?

edited 19th Aug '14 10:44:53 PM by FirockFinion

So I recently had to do a lot of reorganizing in my house to make room for stuff, and I had to get rid of my traditional bookshelf and shoved pretty much every interesting book I own in a box in my garage. Now I have a rugged metal shelving unit that stores appliances and happens to have books on it. It has:

• Vitamix Blender
• Champion Juicer
• A bunch of nutrition/juicing/smoothie books that I couldn't possibly list all of.
• Like four different copies of the Bible
• Electromagnetics by Branislav M. Notaros
• And because I was desperate to get a novel there, I threw a copy of The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll from the shelf below it there.

Interesting! I can't fathom not organising my books in some way, and was surprised that most people in this thread don't do so. Maybe I'm just a bit OCD.