I love reading and have a lot of books in my collection, but they were getting very unorganized, so I decided to do something about it. I have a rack, in which I keep my books. At first, I had organized my books according to the colors of the spine, and I arranged them very nicely and they were very beautiful to look at. It seemed as if there was a rainbow in my rack! It was very good looking, but it wasn’t practical to always keep the books in the exact same place as before. I managed it for a few days, but then it started to get very tough afterwards because after I read a book, I would just put it anywhere in my rack and sometimes when I needed a book, I would have to look for it all over the place and sometimes I couldn’t even find it. I was looking for a book named ‘Ambushed’ and I had thought I had forgotten it somewhere, only to find it buried in a mess of books and magazines after 4-5 months! So, this time I decided to think of a better way of organizing my books. I browsed on the web and these were some of the ideas:

Arrange the books alphabetically
Arrange the books according to size
Arrange the books by color
Arrange the books by genre
Arrange the books by date

I did a quick question-answer session in my mind.

Q. Shall I arrange the books alphabetically?
A. Do you think you can manage that? No way!

Q. Shall I arrange the books by size?
A. Hmmm, maybe.

Q. Shall I arrange the books by color?
A. You already tried that, it looked beautiful, but didn’t work very well for you.

Q. Shall I arrange the books by genre?
A. I can, but maybe in a different way.

Q. Shall I arrange the books by date?
A. I don’t think so.

I liked the sort by genre idea best, but I decided to change it a little. It said, sort the non-fiction and fiction first, and then you can sort them into smaller groups like fantasy, mystery, horror etc. I had mostly fictional books and just 4-5 books which were non-fictional. So instead, I decided to sort them according to moods. For instance adventurous mood, cheerful mood, kinda serious mood and quiet mood. I also made groups like short stories, tell me whys and magazines. Oh, and I also reserved an area for my favourite books like, some of them were by my favourite authors, like E Nesbit’s ‘railway children’ and ‘five children and it’, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘the secret garden, and ‘a little princess’, and all the books of Dr. Suess that I have. I also kept the books, ‘Wonder’ by R J Palacio, and ‘One and the only Ivan’ and ‘Crenshaw’ by Katherine Applegate. I also kept the books according to size, in each of the genres. I labeled the genres and it all looked great!

I started by removing the books from the top shelves and categorized them. Then I removed another shelf of books and did that. I did it one shelf at a time because I knew if I removed all of them at once, I would get lazy to do all the work and postpone it. The top three shelves were done and I was very pleased with myself. (Not bragging.) I cleaned off the layer of dust that had settled on the shelves and rearranged the books neatly. I still managed to make a tiny rainbow in the cheerful mood genre with the books! I also made a category yet to read, for books that I hadn’t read yet. There were about 15 books waiting to be read. I would have been very happy to give some of them to my brother because some of them were not exactly my kind of books. But still, I’ll try to read them. When I came to the 2 lower shelves, I kinda started to get nervous and asked myself if I should remove the books from the shelves because I would usually do a little bit of cleaning on the upper shelves, but never bothered to work on the lower ones and they were getting really messy and were filled up with mostly magazines and papers and craft books. I told myself I can do it, and I took the shelf out and all the mess fell on the ground. I cleaned it up and arranged my books and then on the lower one I arranged magazines and craft books and it looked so good. I was really happy because it really needed cleaning and now it is very neat and functional. But there is still a lot of mess on the floor ( I had put it out of the way while I took the photos,) and I still have to clean it!