How to Organize My Books

 

I have books.  There are books in pretty much every room in the house, though we don't keep books in the bathrooms.   

The other day I wanted to show someone a book, but I couldn't find it. (Bob, if you're reading this I did find it just now when I went down to take these pictures.)  I'm also looking for some of my old journals in hopes they can ground me as I write vignettes about my Peace Corps experiences.  This is spurred on by my writing group.  Basically, I took a class through OLÉ - the lifelong education program through the University of Alaska Anchorage.  

I thought signing up for a writing class would help me write the book for my youngest grandchild.  The other two grandkids got their own books already.  This one was going to be about her great grandmother, whom she is named after.  And it worked.  I wrote parts each week and I have the basic text done.  Now I have to work on the illustrations and mesh them with the text.  

But when the class was about over, the convener said that the weekly meetings would continue and that some of the members had been in the class for several years already.  About that time I got an email from the National Peace Corps Association that gave a step by step how-to booklet on writing about your Peace Corps experience - from the writing to finding an agent and a publisher.  

So I started writing.  But while I could find a couple of old journals that covered my Peace Corps time, others were missing.  

So tackling the biggest bookshelf seemed like a good project.  

Organizing books sounds easy.  Do it by topic.  Or should it be by genre - fiction or non-fiction or poetry or travel books?  What about books that span different topics or genres?

I started with topics.  I pulled out the bird books and the ones that help to identify insects and plants, and mushrooms.  This was going fine until I had books that fit the topic, but not the shelf.  Too big.

There's another problem with sorting books - it's hard not to start reading them.  The Shape of Thought is a book about writing - which is relevant to the writing class. 

 Maybe I can add some ideas to the group. (People are invited to read other writing than their own on occasion.)  It says there are three purposes to write:

1. entertainment
2. explanation
3. convince

Really, is that all?  I have to think about it.  But then the book offers  ten patterns with which to do those things:

1. Basic Structures:  Introduction, Body and Conclusions
2. Narration
3. Description
4. Definition
5. Process Analysis
6. Classification
7. Comparison/Contrast
8. Judgment
9. Cause and Effect
10. Problem and Solution

Each pattern is a chapter with writings of famous and not so famous writers.  I jumped to the last one in the book, written by Art Buchwald that advocated for gun stamps for the poor, because "no American citizen, no matter what his financial status, would be deprived of his right to bear arms."  And "Many of the poor are to blame for this condition [not owning a gun].  They would rather buy food with their money than guns,"   [If it's not obvious, Buchwald was a satirist.]

And I also got distracted by The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Latimore..  I read, and, thanks to a great instructor - Dr. Pasinetti - enjoyed The Odyssey in college.  But I never read The Iliad.  And having toured the remains of the ancient city of Troy last October while we were in Turkey, I had lots of questions.  So I read a few pages of the Iliad but mostly I read the introduction which is 55 pages long.  

The intro covers a number of topics - the plot, questions about Homer and when and where he lived, the Greek Gods' roles in all this, etc.  I just wanted a better sense of the plot.  

"The essential story may be summarized as follows:  Paris, also called Alexandros, was the son of Priam, who was King of Troy, a city in the north-west corner of Asia Mior.  Paris on an overseas voyage was entertained by Menelaos in Sparta, and from there carried away, with her full consent, Helen, the wife of Memelaos.  He took her back with him to Troy, where she lived with him as his wife.  The princes of Greece thereupon raised a force of a thousand or more ships, manned by fighters, with a view to forcing the return of Hele.  The armada was led by Agamemnon, elder brother of Menelaos, the King of Mykenai . . .The fleet assembled in Aulis in Boiotia and made for Troy.  There the Greeks landed after a fight, but were unable to take the city.  For nine years they remained before Troy, keeping the Trojans on the defensive, and storming and plundering various places in the vicinity.  In the tenth year, Agamemnon the most powerful chief, quarreled with Achilleus, his most powerful fighting man.  Achilleus withdrew from the fighting, and kept his followers idle as well.  In his absence, the Trojans, led by Hector (a son of Priam and brother of Paris), temporarily got the better of their enemies and threatened to destroy the ships.  Achilleus returned to the fighting, killed Hector and routed the Trojans."

 

But why did Achilleus and Agamemnon quarrel?  That's revealed later.  

"Chryses, priest of Apollo in Chris, a small place near Troy, comes to the camp of the Greeks to ask for the return of his daughter, Chryseis, who has been captured and allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine.  Agamemnon refuses, and Chryses prays to Apollo to avenge him.  Apollo inflicts a plague upon the Greeks.  When there is no end in sight and the people are dying, Achilles calls an assembly of the chiefs to consider what can be done.  With the support and encouragement of Achilleus, Kalchas the soothsayer explains the wrath of Apollo.  Agamemnon, though angry, agrees to give the girl back and propitiate the god, but demands that some other leader give up his mistress to him, in place of Chryseis.  When Achilleus opposes this demand, Agamemnon takes away Briseis, the concubine of Achilleus. . ." 

Of course, we all know that Troy was sacked to recover the kidnapped Helen.  But from the description it would appear that every 'leader' in Agamemnon's fleet had his own concubine, and Agamemnon appropriates his best fighter's concubine as his own, leading Achilleus to withdraw from fighting which leads to Hector's initial victory.  

In light of the Epstein scandals today, one (at least this writer) can't help but think that men's need for sex objects plays an oversized  role in society and in the suffering of humankind.  After all, they did battle for ten years over a stolen woman!  The Greeks almost had their ships destroyed by Hector, again over a stolen woman (Agamemnon's taking of Achilleus' concubine.).  

In the case of Troy and Greece, there were two powerful entities who fought it out.  And Achilleus had leverage to use against Agamemnon.  But today we seem to have a class of rich men who have found a way to exploit women with little or no counterforce.  (Along with not so rich men who have some other skill that allows them inclusion in the club.)

To be clear, I'm exploring this idea here rather than making firm conclusions.  And while the men of Ancient Greece and Troy may have done battle over specific women, what seems clear from the discussion is that the women had no say in any of this.  Homer translator Latimore tells us that all the leaders of Agamemnon's army had mistresses.  

I'm leaning toward some sort of conclusion that for at least the last 3000 years (the sacking of Troy as related by Homer, whether history, historical fiction, or fiction happened about 1300 BC and women have only gotten the right to vote, the right to an education, to spend money without their husbands' permission, to compete for 'men's' jobs in the last 100 years or so.  (I'm assuming there were some brief periods in isolated locations where women had, for a time, some of these rights.)

Not to mention dragging thousands of others into suffering the wars of the egocentric 'leaders - the soldiers and sailers, the citizens of Troy and surrounding areas, and today the Ukrainians still being bombarded without mercy by Putin's military.  Not to mention the people of Gaza and Lebanon and Iran and elsewhere around the world.  

And in the United States, we now have a president whose treatment of women is not different from the ancient Greeks and that seems to have brought the misogynists out of the woodworks.  This is a more universal problem than USians realize.  Is it built in to men's genes?  Some men's genes?  Is it nurtured by parents, by society?  Is it curable?  

All this from trying to bring order to my book cases.  And that's just a tiny fraction of how I spend my time.  The garden beckons.  Fighting the corruption of the GOP beckons.  My bike and the bike trails beckon.  

Of course, I don't raise questions here, without checking online after I've done my own brainstorming.  Here's a list a ways to organize one's books from WikiHow

1. by genre
2. alphabetically 
3. by color
4. by subject
5. chronologically
6. put rare or valuable books in a noticeable spot
7. by how much you like them
8. by how much you use them
9. by size
10. by date you got them

To a certain extent I use the following:  1, 4, 6, 7, and 9.  It seems to me that organizing by color is for someone who sees books as decoration rather than reading material, but that's just my first reaction and I'm willing to be corrected.