Once you truly accept the fictional chaos wrought by the alphabet, it’s hard to take a forceful stance against any other organizing principle. Books designed with the same color jackets are more likely to have things—themes, moods, genres—in common than books shoved together by their authors’ last names. Retellings? Coming of age stories? Books you read in college? Why not put them in clusters? Why not put a book by another book that it feels like, shelve Angela Carter where she can argue with the Grimms, leave Lev Grossman buddied up to C.S. Lewis, or put every book you read in middle school into its own shelf? (I keep being tempted to reshelve my books in the order in which I read them—a High Fidelity-esque notion that would probably end in tears and a large glass of whiskey.)

Your books are your books, and you get to decide what to do with them.

(Via Molly Templeton at Tor.com)

Mine are a roughly clumped collection of broad topics: container gardening, science fiction, philosophy, poetry, Japanese spas, thrift store finds I’ve yet to process, &c.