Rubber Ducky Copywriter

Behind me as I type this is a small mountain of books that live in bookbags, piles, towers and rows. Don’t judge; you bookworms out there know the struggle. No such thing as too many books. Just not enough bookshelves.

Well, my home office is only 8’ x 8’. Not big. And not big enough to hold this book collection with grace and dignity for anyone involved in its making.

Today is my first day of a week-long staycation. And I’m going to put it to use playing with,….uh….organizing my home library.

And documenting it here for your amusement.

Step 1: Put off task by looking up how to best accomplish said task for the 5,284^th time.

Step 2: Realize that organizing my home library is a Herculean task that even Pegasus (in this case, my cat) wants nothing to do with and start another task (in this case, this post) to put off starting the first task just a little bit longer.

Step 3: Realize that typing will only delay this inevitable and start thinking about how I’m going to accomplish this intimidating goal that I’ve put upon myself.

Let’s start with intention.

What do I want my home library to be?

A purposefully built and carefully curated collection of favorite books that:

Shit, that’s a tall order.

How do I want to organize this?

By categories. Good start. How do I even define my categories? When it comes to reading, I’m one of the most selective, intentional book omnivores you’ll ever meet.

Knowing that I have a tendency toward overly granular organization of anything, I’ll start with these basic categories.

Yes, those are my basic categories. And yes, I love zombies so much, they get their own personal space.

How will I document my home library inventory?

I’ll use a highly rated home library inventory manager app on my phone: BookBuddy, which according to the Apple App Store, has a solid 4.8 stars (12K ratings).

I’ve never used this app before and will provide a full, honest review when I’m done. To start, though, entering my categories was really easy.  Yay, easy!

How will I pick my keepers?

I love my books. And I haven’t read them all. But I also have higher priorities.

Rubber, meet road: the home library criteria.

Here’s my initial approach for sorting the keepers from the others.

• Will I read this book?
• Will I reread this book again?
• Can I borrow this book from the library if I want?

“Get rid of” is too harsh for books I clearly wanted to adopt. Instead of “get rid of,” I’m going to donate all books I don’t intend to keep—but are in good condition—to my local library. They sell them to fund their library programs. And since I grew up on libraries, I’m happy to contribute.

Books that are not in good enough condition to donate to the library will find new homes through my local independent, new-and-used bookstore.

Okay, that’s my starting point. I’m doing this. I have one week. I don’t intend to spend the entire week working on my home library; I have other fun things planned, like sleeping. But I will tackle this one pile and free up some floor space. Then go from there.

Wish me luck.
Ducky