How do you organize your books?

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be more organized. Last night, after a nice dinner date with my sick boyfriend, I had a glamorous night in where I finally tackled my bookshelf. I bet you could hardly contain your excitement! I stopped buying books for a while now and just utilize the library and do swaps with friends. In fact, if you browse through the book reviews I’ve done in 2009, 9 out of the last 10 were books I borrowed. It was just becoming a pain trying to find space for them and then packing them up to move every year. One day I’ll have the extensive library I’ve always wanted and room to store these books. My childhood room in Houston has an entire wall full of books. I figure that’s a start.

In the meantime, here’s my humble little library here in Austin post organization.

I decided to organize by category. On the very top are my photo albums.

Next, my little collection of nonfiction. I think this is it for now too. My books in Houston are mostly classic novels and um, Babysitters Clubs.


Just a small bit of my fiction. I’ve expanded my horizons. For years in high school and most of college, I liked the older classics. The Jane Austens. Bronte’s, and LOVED Oscar Wilde. I kind of just stuck to those and it would take me forever to go through one book as the language is usually a little more dense. I’ve since expanded to include more chick lit, historical fiction, a tiny little bit fantasy (haha Twilight is as far as I went) Palanuiuk, Alain de Botton, Erica Jong. I learned I enjoy reading outside my comfort level.

Pictured above is my collection of books made into movies. I think Portrait of a Lady is a movie right? Next to it is Sense and Sensibility, both nestled next to Twilight. That cracks me up. Next to the movies are the little memoirs, three of which are David Sedaris’s.

My last shelf, I stacked the self help (Um, hello He’s just not that into you and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the references, and the “things to do” books.

P.S. I did some organizing of my journals too. Inspired by Kim’s library also pictured below, I organized my journals by color.

So there you have it. My newly organized bookshelf.

How do you organize your bookshelves?

P.P.S. Yes, those are snowflakes you see hanging around my bookshelf in the first picture. We’ve decorated our entire apartment with snowflakes. They kind of flutter and brush the top of your head sometimes. It’s a poor Texas girl’s way of having snowflakes.