Strut Your Shelves featuring...me!

Thank you for joining me on this first ever addition of Strut Your Shelves!

If you would like to be featured on Strut Your Shelves, please send me an email!  I'm looking for lots of submissions so I can make this a regular feature.  Please email me at notenoughbooksblog(at)gmail(dot)com.

I thought I would take you on a tour of my bookshelves, just to get the party started.  You might have seen pictures of it before, but that's ok, I'm going to explain it a bit more this time around.

Currently I only have one set of bookshelves, or a library cabinet as I sometimes call it.  I would love to have more, but alas, for now I just have one and the rest of my books live in boxes.   I'm lucky enough to have a room dedicated to books in my house.  Yup, I have a library!  The only problem, the bookshelves I envision (taking up one complete wall) will need to be custom made and Husband and I don't think we can do it, so we have to pay somebody.  That's expensive.  We focused on updated the rest of our house first, but that's done now, and we can focus on saving for the library. Yay!  But..alas..back to the library case I do have.

Here it is!  Hope you like it! (Myla decided she wanted her picture taken too). You can click on each picture to view a bigger image, if you wish.

Here's what I have on my shelves.  The door on the far right contains some YA and some random fiction.  These are books that I either loved, plan to get to soon, or are ones I plan to loan my sister when she needs more books.  There is no organization plan to this area.

The two doors in the middle contain all mysteries, mostly cozy.  These are organized alphabetically by author.  I have a lot more books than room, so once I filled the shelves up once, I started back at the top and went down again.   As I've bought more books for the series or new series, I've had to try and get them in the right spot...which has proved very difficult.  It's a mess!  If it wasn't books, I would fix the mess, but since it is books and I like looking at them, I'm ok with it for now.

The shelves on the left contain the books I'm hoping to read for challenges.   Once I sign up for a challenge I go through the books I have and find ones for that challenge.  Then I move them on these shelves (along with a print out of the challenges and the books I'm reading for them).  Then when I'm ready to start a new book, I browse those shelves first in hopes one will catch my interest.   Currently, the bottom shelf holds the books Husband has recently bought and read as well as some books borrowed from a friend.

Oh, and see the white bag and misc books on the far right of the photo?  The books on the floor are ones I pulled out for the WWII challenge last year, as possible reads, and I didn't want to put them back in a box.  The White bag holds books my Grandpa has brought to me from their house so I can put them in my library (if I want).  Isn't that nice of him? I love that he is always thinking of my library and offering me books he thinks will make a great addition.

Now, because I know you are wondering, how many books do I have that aren't on the shelves and where am I storing them?  Why, they are in that same room..but in boxes.   Make no mistake though..they are organized in boxes.

Now, because I like to know how people organize shelves, I'm going to tell you how I plan to organize my books once I have my shelves built.  I plan to have my shelves organized alphabetically by author, and genre. I know, that's going to be a task, but I can't wait!  I love to organize a big project like that!  Rest assured, I will share pictures again once the shelving is in place.  How could I not?  Don't hold your breath though, it's going to be expensive to pay somebody to do it so it won't be done for awhile.  I will however share a picture of what I want my shelving to look like.  I have had a picture from a Better Homes and Gardens magazine on our fridge for almost 2 years now as a reminder of what I want.  Yesterday when reading Kittling: Books, she linked to a bookshelf and it was a great picture of what I had in mind.  Very similar to the picture growing up, but easier to see the size of the spaces.   So, click HERE to go the the NY Times article that has a picture of what I want my shelving to look like.

Thanks for reading this first edition of Strut Your Shelves, I hope you enjoyed it!   If you liked it and would like to see your shelves on display, please email me!  Bloggers and non-bloggers are invited to participate.  You can send as many pictures as you want, or just pick one or two bookcases that you like.  You can give as much or as little detail as you want.