Bookshelf Love

This is one of my bookshelves. Notice the lack of color!

I recently rearranged my bookshelves for the first time in two years. The last time I rearranged my shelves was because we had moved, so it was a necessity. Why had I neglected my bookshelves?

The answers:

• I became a mom
• I had a baby
• I became a teacher
• My baby became a toddler
• I stopped reading for fun *gasp*

I love being a mom and I love being a teacher. However, both of these huge, life-changing moments took up my time, my focus, and I neglected my reading pile and thus, my bookshelves.

Devouring Books Again

All of that has changed the past two summers. Last summer, I got back into reading and began devouring books during my daughter’s nap time and at night before bed. Any chance I got, I read. Several times I would leave for an errand a good hour before I needed to in the hopes that my daughter would fall asleep, which she would nine out of ten times, and I could read in the car for a bit before doing said errand. I continued reading throughout the school year, mainly at night before bed or on the weekends. Now here we are, during the summer, and I am reading as much as I can. I love showing my daughter that I love to read and having her read with me.

With my reawakened love of reading came my decision to write a book blog and to start a “bookstagram” account on instagram where I take pictures of my books and follow others who take pictures of books. These pictures have made me want to read even more and then finally convinced me my bookshelves needed a makeover. One popular bookshelf organizational technique, if you can call it that, is to arrange your books by color, creating a rainbow of book spines. It really is beautiful, so I tried it. I’ll admit, I am not very good at matching colors, noticing changes in tone of color (right word?), or making a bookshelf look pretty in any shape or form. Usually, I organize by genre. I do have two bookshelves, so I left one for my series, I cannot, absolutely no way, break apart my series by color. It would drive me mad that a sequal was not next to its prequal.

I really struggled with my bookshelf being a rainbow because most of my books are black and white! I had two shelves of color! That was it! This was a little discouraging, but two wonderful things happened after I organized my shelves:

1. I remembered all the books I had-some I’d read and some I had not-and realized I want to read them again.
2. I wanted to go shopping for more books. (I have not done this for myself in a long time! I usually buy for my classroom)

Here are some pictures of my wonderful bookshelves. I do take pride in them. These are books from my childhood, teenage years, and college years. There are books that I read over and over and are almost falling apart. There are books filled with sticky notes and highlights. I have classics. History. Nonfiction. Fiction. Fantasy. Diaries. Letters. These books define who I am-a book dragon who loves history and literature.

My only colorful book spines arranged in my best interpretation of the rainbow.

I love this shelf because of the Oxford Classics. My favorite classes in college were my English Literature classes, which is where a large number of these books came from!

A few more classics and some history books here. Also, the Twilight series, which I am not sure why I still own. I suppose it is because of the memories I have with watching the midnight showings of the movies with my mom.

I could not separate these books in order to put on my rainbow shelves. It would drive me crazy knowing they are not together. Two of my favorite series here are the Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry series and, of course, Harry Potter.

Now that you have glimpsed my wonderful bookshelves, I want to know more about yours!

• How do you organize your shelves?
• Are your books more colorful than mine, or do you have a lot of white and black cover books?
• Do you like to reorganize your shelves?
• What does your bookshelf say about you?
• How do you organize your bookshelves?

Now, go change up your bookshelf!