Home Show: Book It

I forgot to mention that we didn't ACTUALLY get a tornado in our 'hood yesterday, but the newscasters would make you think otherwise during the HOT COVERAGE. The weatherpeople really ramp up the rhetoric once the National Weather Service tosses out a warning, and even when you could clearly see on the Doppler radar that the worst of the storm was past, the weather guy was still trying to make it sound like "Well, you just don't know!"

No, I do know, and now I'm going upstairs to take a shower.

The faux-nado left a trail of COLD TEMPS behind it, which totally threw me for a loop today. I don't know what I was planning on doing outside the house with Kiddokabiddo, but with my warm winter jacket packed away (IT WAS 60 FOR A WEEK STRAIGHT, Y'ALL!), we didn't get outside at all. The Kiddo's new nap schedule (TWO AND A HALF WHOLE HOURS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON!) also screwed with things. I was left with nothing to do but to read the newest copy of "Budget Travel" magazine and bake apple cake.

Oh yeah, and I got our bookshelves organized.

We moved a second bookshelf upstairs, and even though all three bookshelves are HEAVILY overflowing, even when they're filled to capacity (and my definition of "capacity" is wall-to-wall, plus stacked on top of the rows), I decided to try my hand at DECORATIVE BOOK-SHELVING.

This is to say: I left space on the shelves.

What do you think?


I left the bottom two shelves on both empty since that's going to be primo Kiddo height and we're going to bring out her books to put on those, and I still need/want to put crap on the sides of the shelves (should I??), but that's it. Here's a close up:




I had a great time organizing them and coming up with weird themes like "books about school" and "books about the desert West," as well as designating a whole shelf for "books by my favorite authors ever" (that's the shelf on the bottom of the last pic: singles by Anne Sexton, Jo Ann Beard, Charles Baxter, and Lauren Groff, and then my collections of Margaret Atwood, Sherman Alexie, Annie Proulx, and Kathryn Harrison [the latter of whom is not one of my favorite authors ever, yet I happen to have almost all of her books]).

It was funny as I was weeding through what books would stay and which ones would go downstairs. I was trying to keep books that I read frequently so it would be easy to have my faves on hand when I needed a new book to read before going to sleep, but I TOTALLY was lying to myself when I brought down books like "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" and my inherited Jodi Picoult collection. I WAS TRYING TO LOOK COOL BY HIDING AWAY THE BOOKS SOCIETY HAS DEEMED "UNCOOL!"

At least I left "Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason" up.