I had been having all sorts of problems with my new bookshelves.
First, now that I had enough room to pull all my books out of storage,
I wasn’t sure how to arrange them on the shelf. Alphabetical by author?
By genre? Second, what to do with all those embarrassingly bad books
from my childhood? Display them proudly on the shelf, or hide them in
shame?

The second problem was pretty easy to solve. My cousin Michael suggested
that I keep almost all my books, but get rid of the ones that are
so bad that A) I would never read them again and B) I would never inflict
on a friend, son/daughter, niece/nephew, and so on. So that made it
fairly painless. For example, I still have fond memories of the first six
Dragonlance novels, so they stay. But the “apocryphal” Dragonlance novels
are all right out. Also out are all those crappy Robotech and D&D novels —
except for R.A. Salvatore, who just barely makes the cut. And so on.

The arranging-the-books problem was harder, but fortunately my hand was
forced. I had all my books in piles on the floor for over a week. I think
I was trying to dream up some complicated alpha-by-genre scheme. Anyway,
I was having a small get-together last weekend, and the appointed hour
had nearly arrived. I looked at the books, said, “Screw it”, and slammed
them all up on the shelf.

So now my books are in essentially random order, but if you look at them
it appears as if there are little pockets of order. But this
is false. For example, all Orson Scott Card books are together, except oops!
Xenocide is sitting over by The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
So if you think you can infer where a particular title is, guess again! You’re
probably wrong.

The cover plan is to tell people that my bookshelves are an artistic
statement. They represent the ultimate triumph of chaos over order, the futility of
categorizing human knowledge, and the radical and subversive juxtaposition of
different human ideas (“Rousseau’s Confessions next to Jackson’s
Classical Electrodyamics… how droll!”)

My Turner Prize awaits.