Another trip

Come Thursday, I’ll be on my way to France for my school’s French exchange. I’m really looking foward to it, but I’m nervous ‘cos I’ve never done one of the exchanges before!

I’ve been trying to sort out my packing today so that I won’t have to do it at the last minute. I was talking to my mum about taking books on holiday. She said something like ‘Make sure you only take ones you’ve read and enjoyed: that way, you know they’re going to be good.’

I was surprised, because that’s totally the opposite of my view. I only take books I haven’t read so that I get a chance to start something new and I can narrow down my selection of reading matter. If I only take books I haven’t been getting round to, then short of not reading anything for the whole trip (not likely – especially with 14 hours on a coach!) I’ll have to get round to some of them.

I also think it’s a good idea to take books I haven’t read before because then I associate them with the place I went. If I take books I’ve already read at home, then they conjure up images of places I’m trying to get away from. I’d rather be able to sink into a book and enjoy the memories of my time away!

What are your thoughts? Do you prefer to take old favourites, new novelties or a mixture of the two?

What was I thinking?

Ever have one of those ‘huh?’ moments about a book you’ve selected or written down?

One of the sites I use a lot has a ‘notepad’ feature, which I use infrequently and never clear out. I decided to tackle the task today, uncovering several book titles I’d noted for myself.

It’s pretty normal for me to totally forget a book that I’ve written down and not recognise the description at all, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment when I’m so entirely blank about why I’ve written a book down in the first place.

The book in question? ‘A Divine Revelation of Hell’ by Mary K. Baxter. Having looked it up, I have absolutely no idea why I noted it. It’s definitely not the kind of book I’d like to read…’tis a mystery!

What are your ‘book amnesia’ moments?

Reordering TBR pile

One of the recent Booking Through Thursday topics was how people arrange their books.

I didn’t participate, but I read lots of responses, and I was surprised how many people didn’t order their books alphabetically. I’ve always thought that arranging books by author’s surname is the ‘right’ way to do it and I’ve always poured scorn on the idea of arranging them any other way.

I do like having my main bookshelf ordered alphabetically as I normally look at it wanting a specific book, but my TBR pile is another matter. Quite often I’ll look at the two shelves of unread books thinking ‘hmm, some crime today’ or something similar and have to search through them all to find what books I have that fit the bill.

Today, I decided to bite the bullet and reorganise my TBR pile by genre.

I took all the books off the shelves and then put the ones I could definitely fit into categories (eg. crime) on the shelves. Then I worked from what was left to decide what the other categories should be.

Here’s what I ended up with:

• Crime and thrillers
• Drugs & America
• Comedy and lighthearted crime/murder
• Nonfiction and memoirs (real and fictional)
• Classics, chicklit and everything else (in that order but all stored as one block on the shelf)

I think I’ll end up preferring this system, but there’s no way I’d reclassify all my books like this as it requires much more thought for me to decide what genre a book is than it is to arrange it alphabetically. I had quite a lot of fun trying to categorise books I haven’t read, which is why I ended up with almost 1/4 of my books being in the ‘everything else’ pile.

I’ll give the new system a try and report back!tbr