Rereading Sean Stewart's Mockingbird, I noticed the reviews on the front and back cover. Neal Stephenson says "Stephen King meets Ibsen. Trust me." The San Diego Union-Tribune begins theirs with "A gentle, funny, affirming novel..." They do go on to say "Like a poet with a cattle prod..." but still: gentle? I'm not sure they and Stephenson read the same book. I'm quite sure they and I didn't. Stephenson and I probably did, though I'd quibble with the choice of authors; I'd have said Stewart combines Stephenson himself with maybe Viginia Woolf, and I'm more sure about the Stephenson than the Woolf. And a dash of Connie Willis, too.
I've been taking advantage of working at home today to spend my lunch break illing out the new bookshelves. Shelving books is such a subjective thing. For example, I separate hardbacks and paperbacks because they just don't sit well together -- but what about big trade-format paperbacks? Byatt's Possession, for example, is larger than most of my hardbacks. I decided to put them with the paperbacks for now, just because the space worked well that way. I did think of seprating them into their own space, but sometimes the line between mass-market PB ad other PB is a very thin one. I've also separated out Rudder's technothrillers (Tom Clancy, Steven Coonts, and so on) from my mystery PBs, with whom they had been interleaved, just because it let me fit the latter all in one case.
All of the fiction is now neatly shelved with some space for additions, but I still have a lot of crowding in the nonfiction bookcase, especially in the biographies, history, and opinion (those three categories sound redundant!). I may be able to move the PBs among them into the living room, especially because I have one shelf there that's set too short for anything but PBs, and leave the hardbacks where they are. Or I could get rid of some (we are talking about such literary gems as Robert Fulghum's essay collections, ...and more by Andy Rooney, Katherine Hepburn's Me, and On the Road with Charles Kuralt. Still as soon as I did that I'd nudoubtedly have a yen to reread one. Sometimes I'm just not up for literary gems.
I bet this all isn't nearly as much fun if you're a professional librarian and they're not your own books.
Posted by dichroic at April 19, 2004 09:26 AM