You know you're big-time geeks and/or have no social life when the big event of your weekend is reorganizing the bookshelves after a major shopping spree at a used book store and a Border's that is going out of business. I seem to dimly recall a time when I did things like go to bars and parties on the weekends. (In some cases, the foggy memory may be less because of the time between then and now and more due to the beverages consumed at said parties/bars!) However, there's always a great sense of accomplishment and a weird feeling of pride when the job is done and you can step back and admire a newly organized library.
Of course, it's also a great way to find out ways that you and your spouse are very different...
Now, different is definitely not a bad thing. As cool as it would be in theory if my wife could join in when I start quoting entire scenes from Star Wars, I think that the reality of the situation would probably be a little tiresome (at least to anyone in the blast radius). So I'm thankful that my wife and I have many shared interests and tastes, but also differ in a lot of interests. And the combined Hanke Library collection is one of the shining illustrations of those differences.
In most other things that couples sometimes share, Sarah and I pretty much don't distinguish between "mine" and "yours." We have a shared bank account, shared credit card, watch pretty much the same TV shows (with the exception of Sarah mostly ignoring Sportscenter constantly!), and so on. However, our bookshelves definitely exist in an era before the paperback equivalent to Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. There are my books and there are her books, and they don't play well with others! With only a few exceptions, they can't even share the same shelf in the bookcase (the exceptions are: "classic" works, yearbooks, Bibles and hymnals, and a tiny portion of the history section).
Most of this is due to the wide gulf between our most cherised genres. I will admit that Sarah probably comes out looking better (or at least more broadly read) than me in this comparison. Her tastes kind of meander through many genres - she has a historical fiction and general history section, a bunch of general fiction novels (Barbara Kingsolver being one of her favorite authors here), as well as some sappier stuff like PS I Love You and Nicholas Sparks. She has read her share of "classic" works, and has an entire shelf full of books in Spanish from her time as a Spanish major at the University of Michigan. (In contrast, the only foreign language is any of my books would be Elvish in my Tolkien.) Her current genre-du-jour are Save the Earth/farming/foodie books. In fact, one of the main impetuses (that feels like it should be impeti, doesn't it?) for our reorg was that Sarah wanted to concatenate all of her foodie and enviro and farming books in one shelf.
My tastes, well - let's just say they don't run entirely parallel (although I did dutifully read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan on Sarah's recommendation and enjoyed it). My book collection is a direct outgrowth of my avid geekery - or, as my sister would probably put it, when you look at my bookshelves, my "geek is sticking out." Until very recently, I read every single Star Wars novel published (my current total is an even 90 mainstream novels, plus assorted reference materials, role-playing game guides, etc). Some of these were great, some were good - many were bad and a few were horrendous, but I was nothing if not loyal. I also have a few other geeky Sci-Fi books (some of my favorites are in the Wing Commander universe), and a decent collection of what I would refer to as "more realistic Sci-Fi" - I own Michael Crichton's entire collection except Pirate Latitudes, which I read and just haven't purchased yet. I also have a few thriller-type novels (Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, John Grisham).
Outside of my Star Wars EU books, though, by far my biggest genre is Fantasy. I'm not a true fantasy geek, since in this weekend reorganization I was basically able to fit all of my Fantasy novels on a single shelf (I also have never dressed up and attended a Renaissance Fair or convention, which is an automatic disqualification). However, that shelf is stacked two deep all the way across to hold all of my Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and Robert Jordan novels. I do have some spillover, which is mostly C.S. Lewis, as I loved the Chronicles of Narnia all the way from childhood. And yes, if anyone reads this who truly is a Fantasy geek - I do realize that I need to branch out and get into a few of the other Pillars of Fantasy Lit. I'm working on it.
The Sci-Fi/Fantasy books are really where Sarah's oil meets my water (or vice versa if you prefer). I attempted to get her hooked by starting with the beginning of the Belgariad by Eddings, but she got bored a book or two in and gave it up. I knew it was hopeless at that point. The only cross-over here are our shared Harry Potter books, though I'm pretty sure most self-respecting geeks would argue that those don't count as Fantasy.
The other interesting difference to note in our styles is the organization of books within a given shelf/genre section. After around three-and-a-half years of marriage, I still have not been able to discern any particular logic to how my wife places her books within a given genre or shelf. This was especially bad on the cookbooks shelf (my wife - to my great delight - also loves collecting cookbooks. Yum!), until I put my foot down and requested that some semblance of order be instituted. I sort of coaxed this one from her by implying it would make it easier for me to find a given cookbook when I needed to, but I'm pretty sure Sarah saw through that smokescreen.
In contrast, I tend to have a rigidly enforced ordering of my books. All books are grouped by author first (except for the Star Wars collection). Any books that form a series (even a loose one like Brooks' books) get put in order within the series - I go crazy whenever I go to a bookstore that sorts series by an author alphabetically. I had to get a little more creative with the Star Wars chronology, since they got banished to the guest bedroom on a couple of different shelves, so I used personal preference to shunt some to the back. I also tried originally to sort our history section by date for the topic (I basically did this with my DVD collection - Troy going on the bottom through Glory and ending up at Hotel Rwanda), but I got overruled because we had to do that stacked vertically due to space constraints, and Sarah's point that vertical stacks of different-sized books need to have the biggest books on the bottom won out. Still, I may rearrange those when she's not looking!
And so, after pulling most of the books down from the shelves, sorting, resorting, trying to fit too many on any given shelf, resorting again, and finally figuring out a system that works, Sarah and I could both step back and admire our newly rechristened library - even if we were each admiring a different section of it.
And hey - at least this way we don't have to worry about getting in each other's way if we're both looking for a book!
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