She arranges them alphabetically, of course. Hanya Yanagihara keeps some 12,000 books in her Manhattan apartment. philosophy, psychiatry and the history of medicine.” Her own books she tucks into a tiny room so she doesn’t have to look at them. Naipaul.”), then Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Chinese and Russian, “ancient history, Judaism, a huge library of early Christianity, followed by Byzantium and the Middle Ages. Of course, when I get into the modern stuff you can see who I read and who I don’t. There’s Oscar Wilde, and there’s Meredith and Hardy. Here’s Beckford, William Blake and then Wordsworth. and then comes Shakespeare, Elizabethan Stuart plays, Marlowe, Middleton, Webster, the poets. It starts here, and here are the Chaucerians. I couldn’t put Pynchon next to Plato! It doesn’t make sense.” Instead, Sontag has a section for English literature (“You need a ladder. He does his books alphabetically, and that sets my teeth on edge. “I know people who have a lot of books,” she told Leslie Garis for The New York Times in 1992. The Beowulf to Virginia Woolf principle.” But never alphabetically. Susan Sontag arranged her books “by subject or, in the case of literature, by language and chronologically. If it inspires you to spend an evening taking all of your books off the bookshelves and putting them back on again, well, you’re welcome. (Sorry.) Of course, I always find it particularly interesting to find out how voracious readers (and often this means writers) organize-or once organized-their bookshelves, and so to that end, I’ve tracked down the systems, current and former, of a few notable literary figures below. After all, as Jeanette Winterson once said, “when we go to somebody’s house, what’s better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody’s ever going to say, “Can I see the index to your Kindle?” It’s so depressing and so unsexy.” A person’s bookshelves can tell you a lot about them-their interests, their histories, their dusting abilities-and while the content is what’s most important, of course, the organization can also speak volumes. You’ve also probably snooped in someone else’s personal library. Obviously I’m joking, but let’s face it: if you’re reading this space, you probably have some opinions about the best way to arrange your books. Do you alphabetize? Do you color-code? Do you have no system at all? You’ll have to pick a side. There’s a secret war raging on the internet.
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