Our Bookshelves (a really long picture post)

I saw a few of my favorite bloggers doing Modern Mrs. Darcy's bookshelf link up last week, and said to myself, "I've got to do that one too!"  We have serious books goin' on here, folks.  My husband and I are both academics, and bibliophiles to boot, so when we moved in to this house, we had 60 boxes of books. Yes, sixty.  We immediately pared down 10 boxes worth, but then spent another few years accumulating their equal in children's books, and the last couple of years weeding out from both collections.  I present to you: our bookshelves. And for the record, I have paired down one whole bookshelf these last three years, but didn't photograph the stack on my nightstand.

Starting in my office/guest room/craft space, we have two bookshelves.  This one holds the kids' baby books and photo albums from 2010 onward, plus a variety of parenting/education/writing a novel/sewing references.  It also houses my stamps and Big Shot.

A close up of the second shelf: The Well Trained Mind, Book in a Month (so useful!), The Collette Sewing Book, plus the usual parenting reference suspects.

On the other side of the desk is the liturgical bookshelf.  It holds my choir music folders from when I was directing, the Menaion for the year, two shelves of service books and other liturgical references.  The bottom two shelves are law books my husband uses when he preps his classes from home.

Close up of second and third shelves.  The big red books are the menaion from Holy Transfiguration Monastery.  They are huge, but well put together and lovely to chant from--they are metered for Byzantine style chant.

In the icon room next door, we have this bookshelf, which contains a few prayer books to use in the icon corner to the right, but the rest is children's literature.  The top shelf has my ChildCraft series (the first two books are fabulous for the older preschool set); the second shelf is books for elementary age kids (Chronicles of Narnia, the Little House books, some Encyclopedia Brown, etc).  The second to bottom shelf is the stuff the kids read now.

Our current reading for the kids:

When they are a little older:

And now to the living room.  We have 10 foot ceilings in the living room and the bookcases go all the way up.  The shelves on the bottom are filled with games, toys, seminary materials, and some other ephemera, but the top are all books.  And I'm a little embarrassed to report that the top two rows of each book case are double stacked.

From top to bottom, left to right: Science, poetry/19th century literature (with plays stacked behind); political science/biography, high-brow literature; philosophy, social/cultural commentary; history, low-brow fiction. Bottom shelf, left side: craft books, piano music, Greek school books for Piglet, a few coffee table type books.  Bottom shelf, right side: OED, other reference works.

From the "low brow" fiction: my favorite series of all time: Outlander (currently being made in to a mini-series by Starz!  So. Excited).  Also, my undergraduate and master's theses on the far left.  And Master and Margarita, and The Thorn Birds.  Oh, and The English Patient.  All high on my list.

The history shelf (which has been pruned rather severely since I'm no long er active in academia). Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra is one of my favorites, as it has (among other things) one of the best descriptions of the causes of WWI I've ever come across.  Also, Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, which is the best book about the collapse of the Soviet Union (in my opinion).  Oh, and Land of the Firebird by Suzanne Massie is great too--a cultural history of Russia up to the mid-20th century.

The top shelves (Dostoevsky--my husband's favorite), Sherlock Holmes, and other assorted "good" literature.

Social/cultural commentary: I loved The Shallows (Nicholas Carr), The Big Necessity (Rose George), Crunchy Cons (Rod Dreher) and Coming Apart (by Charles Murray).  I could write essays on each book and discuss talking points for days, but will leave them for another day.

The other bookshelf in the living room:

From top to bottom, left to right: languages (Greek, French, Russian, German), popular theological works (C.S. Lewis mostly); lives of saints/writings of the Fathers; Bibles, commentaries, extra-liturgical texts (the green books), more lives of saints; the writings of the Church Fathers, Ancient Christian commentary; (bottom shelf, left hand side): children's books, far right side: coffee table type books.

Some lives of Saints:

Whew!  That's it!!  I do tend to squirrel books away in closets, and let's not get started on the ebooks on my kindle app, but this is mostly what we have.  I confess that I feel slightly bereft if I don't have something to read, and am usually reading about five things at once.  Currently, I'm reading Victorian Secrets by Sarah Chrisman on my kindle app, and I'm going to write up a review as soon as I finish it.  It definitely has some interesting talking points.