necessitated putting my dresser where my bookshelves were, and the bookshelves moved to the living room. I don’t know why I thought it would be smart to tackle all this today; perhaps because I have spent so much quality time in my apartment this week that I could stand its flaws no longer. Anyway, moving the books & shelves forced me to look at how hopelessly out-of-order my books are. I’ve never been one to organize my books except by vague “pride of place” arrangements that only make sense in my head. I’ve needed to move the bookshelves a few times since moving here, so now they don’t even make that much sense. Here’s a random sampling of one shelf, left to right:
Critereon Collection DVD set, Brazil
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
Clear Waters Rising, an account by a man who walked an extremely long way but I can’t remember just how far right now
Wuthering Heights
The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
An antique, imperialist atlas
Cultivating Stillness, Eva Wong
Keep Going by Joseph Marshall
You Shall know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers
I Like You (children’s book)
The Little Prince, Saint-Exupery
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
Thank You And OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan, David Chadwick
Teaching A Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
Things Invisible to See, Nancy Willard
Last Love in Constantinople, Milorad Pavic
The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Dillard again
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The PowerBook, Jeannete Winterson
Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor
Zen Physics, David Darling
my new fighting technique is unstoppable, David Rees
Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino
Amphigorey Also, Edward Gorey
the Tao Te Ching
Chuang Tsu
America in Passing, Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Zen of Seeing, Frederick Franck
and stuffed on top of these (this being the bottom shelf of the last bookcase):
Spanish for Dummies
Animations of Mortality, Terry Gilliam
A planning guide for the Appalachian Trail
A ziplock bag full of slides of my work
a detective novel that my aunt inexplicably sent to me
a book about caring for/coping with your Portuguese Water Dog
None of the other shelves make any more sense. I don’t want to alphabetize, but I do want to organize by general theme . . .
