Shelves

The Weekly Wrap: February 15-21

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The Weekly Wrap: February 15-21

Am I Being Shelfish?

Do you have more books than shelves to put them on? So do I. And so do most bibliophiles I know. Books on tops of books. Books behind books. And books in piles on any available flat surface. I’ve used all those strategies.

I look enviously at those images on social media of elegant shelves of books lining the wall of a study. There is a wall in my office that is a mix of shelves, storage, and a low table. I dream of converting it to a wall of shelves.

And I realize that I would probably have those shelves immediately filled.

Then, in moments of stark realism, I realize I’m in my eighth decade. One way or another, the day is coming when those books must be disposed of. Perhaps it is time to think about shrinking my books to the shelves I have. My fifties might have been the time for that wall of shelves.

Sure, bibliophiles like Umberto Eco built huge libraries of books (50,000 in his case). But it seems to me that it might make more sense to pare my books to the ones I treasure. I have enough shelves for those.

Five Articles Worth Reading

I’ve read a couple of books recently that incorporate the idea of conferring personhood on nature. Another approach is to calculate the cost to nature of economic activity. Nick Summer reviews three new books that explore this idea in “Want to Put a Price Tag on Nature? Ask an Economist.”

I’m glad I’m not the only one put off by the look-alike book covers in the fiction sections of bookstores. Ted Gioia argues that the death of midlist publishing is part of the reason in “The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul.”

Yascha Monk argues that his colleagues in academia are wrong that AI is not creative or intelligent, that these tools are “stochastic parrots [that] can do some impressive things like summarize an email or write boilerplate corporate language; but they are congenitally incapable of making a genuine intellectual or artistic contribution.” In “The Humanities Are About to Be Automated” he describes how he used Claude, an AI tool, to create a credible academic paper in two hours. And he includes the paper.

Then there is the technology of war. In the past, it was aircraft, ships, armaments. People are present in the place where these are utilized. But the new face of warfare is drones. Nic Rowan explores the impact of this new dimension of warfare in Ukraine in “A Kiss in the Killhouse.”

Finally, there are times when it is hard to find time to read. Bekah Waalkes recommends “Seven Books to Read When You Have No Time to Read.” One of her recommendations was Ali Smith’s Gliff which I thoroughly enjoyed last year.

Quote of the Week

Jewish novelist Chaim Potok is one of my favorite authors. His birthday was February 17, 1929. He offers this delightful invitation:

“Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.”

Of course, the books we are reading are among those happy things!

Miscellaneous Musings

In the Introduction to Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham quotes this statement from Jewish writer Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.” She notes Germany began burning books in 1933 and began burning people in 1941. This makes me think about thresholds. When we breach one, burning or banning books, and get away with it, we are emboldened to breach others including getting rid of people we consider a threat. While we are not yet burning people, we are banning, disappearing and deporting those we don’t like, and not just those here illegally, in the United States. In the last ten years, we began increased efforts to ban books. Now we are buying warehouses around the country to “detain” refugees for “vetting,” even though the refugees came here legally and most have no criminal record. It should trouble all of us. If we accept all these things, it won’t end with them.

I’ve been reading a book on fact-checking. I find it challenging to see the rigorous standards for those who do this for a living, many as free-lancers. More of us are publishing than ever. I personally think all of us who publish in any form, including re-posting memes making claims, have the obligation to check our facts, if we care about truth and not just rhetoric. But that is a big “if’ that I think we increasingly are indifferent to.

I’m reading my second Jane Austen novel, Mansfield Park. There is a play that occupies a lot of space in the novel and I’m curious how much will turn on that play. And I find myself rooting for Fanny Price.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Matthias Henze and David Lincicum, editors, Israel’s Scriptures in Early Christian Writings

Tuesday: Rhonda Mawhood Lee, Suicide and the Communion of the Saints

Wednesday: Deborah Ann Appler and Terry Ann Smith, Ezra-Nehemiah

Thursday: Richard Powers, The Overstory

Friday: Karen J. Johnson, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap  for February 15-21.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Shelving Solutions

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One of my shelves

One of the challenges for voracious readers is where to shelve their books. In terms of physical books, I am at the point where any book I finish goes on the giveaway or resale piles unless I pull something else off the shelves in its place. If I haven’t thought of or read the book in ten years, it’s a good candidate to get culled out.

A Bookriot article today, “Ways to Shelve Your Books on Goodreads” brings up another shelving dilemma that our book apps create. Where do we shelve our books electronically? Actually, this has been quite useful at times when I have done posts on books in a particular category. The challenge is figuring out the categories, which I may suspect vary widely from person to person. The article suggests some different ways including the year read, the format and location, the genre, by author and book identifier. Here’s what mine currently looks like:

Goodreads Bob Trube The United States 1 056 books

The article provides several examples for different kinds of readers. I am probably much like the author of the article in that my categories get more specific with types of literature I especially like. In my case, it has to do with various subcategories of Christian literature. Mine include works of theology, spiritual formation, on culture, on politics, leadership, ethics, apologetics, and Bible study and more. Under biography, I created a category of presidential biographies because this is one of my favorite genres. Probably I should create one on British royalty!

That brings up another question. When do you create a new category? And if you do, do you go back and “re-shelve” books into that category. I did this with presidential biographies and when I created my “inklings” shelf, but, because I read numbers of books, that can be a bit of work. I might be inclined to consider it “busywork” that I don’t have time for. But that is just me.

Probably the greatest usefulness of this to me is that I regularly get asked the question of “what is a good book on…?” It can be handy to pull up my shelves on my phone and offer a few suggestions. If it was just up to memory, I’d probably find myself saying, “I’ll get back to you” which may never happen.

It is also handy in providing a more extensive set of categories than is easily accommodated here on the blog. I still dream of creating an indexing system that would work here, but at this point it is a dream. You can always search a title on the blog. For categories, my Goodreads page works better and all the reviews I do here are also there.

All this falls in the category of “first world problems.” My suggestion if you are trying to create more shelves than “reading” and “read” is that you create a list of the categories of books you most like to read. Create new categories for things that don’t fit.  Then as you go along combine categories where the numbers of books remain just a few. Figure out if there are any categories that are particularly relevant to your work or other interests. And don’t worry if it looks nothing like your friends. That’s what makes it interesting!