bookshelf
Originally uploaded by chotda.

It turns out that I managed to get done almost everything on my to-do list with the exception of the hair and makeup things and really, that's for the best. Later on this evening, after the cameraphone I left in the bottom of my bag for two weeks finishes charging up, I'll take a picture of myself because my hair is now long enough to pull up into a bun with the ends pointing all over the place. Also, I have not run a brush through it in four days; this is my definition of a Good Hair Day, and it should be pretty obvious why I appearance is at the bottom of all my lists.

Which brings us to the books.

I did in fact, take every single book in the house and pile them in the middle of the living room, and then sort them by jacket color until I had enough to approximate the picture that you see accompanying this entry (assuming you slick California people are not all reading this on Blackberries as you commute). And I learned two things:

1. Books are not Skittles.


2. Also, this is all Dirk Pitt's fault.

Oh y'all it's horrible. I found that I have a metric ton of white books, which don't actually fit anywhere but I need to have at hand because I either tend to re-read them or just pull them down from the shelves to look up quotes in. (Oddly enough they are all Agatha Christies, so perhaps I will do a Pure White Book shrine of them, because there's nothing remotely serial killer about that at all).

I found that my layout of bookshelves, which I adore and which makes my living room a serene and beautiful place for humans and rabbits alike, is not conducive to the ROY G BIV organizational schema. And I found out that as I organized, more books came pouring out of the woodwork--I found them in boxes in the basement, stacked in the attic, hidden in closets.



Don't worry, there will be pictures of my own catastrophe. Me not posting a picture of this chaos would probably kill Jen deyd. But see the bit where the camera died in my bag for a fortnight.



This all came to a head when I desperately needed to find my beloved paperback copy of Clive Cussler's Inca Gold. I forget exactly why I needed to find it, but it was crucial that I did, that very night. And before I moved all the books around, I knew for certain that all the Dirk Pitt books were on the second shelf of the middle bookcase, the one that used to be an entertainment center. Of course now that shelf is full of black books, so obviously I moved Inca so that it matches the rest of schema.



I thought that I remembered that the book jacket was blue, which meant it would be on one of the blue shelves. There are five shelves of blue books. Inca Gold was not among them.



Yeah. My copy? Has a black jacket. And yet it was not in the entertainment center. It has gold lettering, so I put it up with the yellows and golds (two shelves). Took me 15 minutes to figure this out, and I maintain I only found it by accident because I misfiled Dis Moi! Volume Un and that's a big book to be out of place.

That's right. Clive Cussler was sacrificed to the fickle fashions of book organization. So next weekend I'm going to pull them all down again and just throw darts. Men Ships and the Sea? Totally next to Josh's Bible. Cacti and Other Succulents? Right next to Susan Faludi's Backlash. I may use runes to do this, or dice, or a cup of strong tea.

Or I may learn to live with it all and go deal with my hair.