The random bookcase

My poor wife hates moving house, she finds it frustrating on an existential level, and enormously tiring. I understand completely where she is coming from, and when she tells me how much it sucks, I still bite my tongue and don't tell her how much I find it tremendously exciting, no matter how hard it gets.

She doesn't need to hear that. That won't help anybody.

But I do secretly love it, because it's a chance to redo all the bookshelves, to sort them out in new and interesting configurations. I fucking live for that shit. 

I have put hours of thought and labout into organizing my bookshelves. I find it very calming, and very relaxing. If something isn't quite right on the shelves, if a book is in the wrong place - and it's always obvious - I have to remedy it as soon as humanly possible.  Sometimes I order them on a thematic level, other parts are by author, and most of the time it's by size, and whatever fits. 

And our recent move back to the big city has seen a complete revamp of the bookshelf space in our house, and I am very much into it. The new place has loads of storage space, so I've been able to get all my 2000ads and Empire magazines out of our rented storage unit, and air out some books that have sat in a banana box for a decade now. 

There are dozens of boxes, and I've proper fucked my arms lifting them around, but I've also stashed them all away in the old concrete room downstairs, for easy access. And I'm taking my time going through them, and deciding which of them are bookshelf worthy, and which can go back in the box.

I've got all the worries in the world hanging over my head, just like everybody else, but it doesn't matter when I'm digging out all the BPRD comics I haven't read since 2012. I have no idea what happens in each individual issue. It's all the fun of getting new books, without spending any money on them.

But I'm taking my time sorting out the main bookshelves, the ones my lovely wife got for me exactly 10 years ago. As I slowly bring the boxes up from their concrete tomb, I start by shoving all the books wherever they will fit, and slowly organising them over the next few weeks, months and years.

It's not just the aesthetics of the thing, it's the personal nostalgia, sorting out the books stirs up all sorts of terrific memories when I'm reminded of their existence - every book on that bookcase blew my fucking mind when I first read it, and I can still feel the embers of that cultural explosion in my head. It lingers.

And I'm definitely shallow enough to also have a deep emotional connection to the Alice in Sunderland and Art of Grendel books that I bought during our days of international travel. We don't travel so much any more, but those books can take me anywhere.

But I have worlds and universes on those bookshelves, that are slowly taking shape, in their right and proper way.