Some of our books

About a month ago, I posted some recent photographs in my Facebook album.

Slightly to my surprise, a picture of Cleo received several comments. Only the comments were not about Cleo as such; they were about the tall bookcase on which Cleo was perched.

So, just in case it's of interest to people who read this blog too, I thought I would dedicate a post entirely to our bookshelves.

Here, first of all, are the majority of our fiction shelves, which are in the dining room. Cleo was no longer perched there when I took this one:


In our old house, Richard's books were in the bedroom, mine were in the study, non-fiction in the living room, and the general children's and teenage books were in our central 'atrium'. And, of course, Daniel and Tim had their own bookcases in their bedrooms.

In this house, we decided to combine our fiction in the dining room. But just the 'grown-up' fiction, and the older teenage books, such as those by LM Montgomery, EM Brent-Dyer, JK Rowling, LM Alcott and the like. They are alphabetical by surname of the author.

The children's fiction (about 500 books) is in our guest flat. As is some other fiction which we thought we wouldn't read again, but guests might enjoy.

Then there's another bookcase in the dining room that's by itself, because there are a door and window in the way, preventing it from being right next to the others. Here, under two paintings (by Richard's grandmother) are the T through W fiction books, and - since we had the Ikea shelves - two whole spare shelves!


It won't be long before those shelves start to be filled. In addition to about 20 books which, at any time, are out on loan to various friends, I have another 18-20 in my study bookcase, waiting to be read (or re-read). Those are the ones at the top in this picture; underneath are non-fiction books to read, or books about writing, or books for reference for my websites.


And then there are our main non-fiction shelves, in the living room. Actually the one on the left is our DVD bookcase, which is also starting to look surprisingly full, even though we only watch about one per month. We're really not a TV-viewing family.

Anyway, the bookcase on the left is the general non-fiction one, arranged not by author at all, but by a mixture of genre and size. The big ones are at the bottom. And on the right is the Christian non-fiction bookcase, roughly in alphabetical order (of author) but also has the biggest ones on the bottom, where they fit.


I didn't take photos of the other books - a couple of bookcases in Daniel's room, and three in Tim's, as well as one in our bedroom with Richard's sailing and adventure books, and his 'to-be-read' fiction, and a couple of shelves of art books sitting on the stairs.

I've catalogued most of our books at Bibliophil and Goodreads, though not yet all of them. At best guess, we have around three thousand in all, which doesn't seem like very many to me, but is considerably more than most people in Cyprus seem to have.