Book Sorting

I have such mixed feelings about book sorting. On the one hand, is there anything more satisfying than a freshly re-organised bookshelf? On the other hand, pretty much the only time I sort books is when I need to get rid of some. That was the case this time.

We’re moving house in the next couple of weeks, so we’ve been trying to purge as much stuff as possible beforehand. I did a big Marie Kondo-style sort a while back (and posted about it here, actually!) so I didn’t have a tonne of excess stuff. But I did have about 320 books, and shelf space for… fewer than that.

I love books, and I love having books, and it always makes me sad getting rid of them. But this weekend, I had to thin out the collection at least somewhat. I steeled myself, and went in planning to reduce my library by half. I also documented the process for posterity, and in case the process is useful to any of you lovely lot!

How I began the Great Book Sorting of 2020

First step: get all of the books in one place. This took a while, although not quite as long as the next step: sorting the books into their genres.

I did this pretty loosely. For instance, I combined horror and crime, because I only had about four of each. I lumped historical fiction in with adult contemporary, because I only had three historical fiction books. The point of this was not to organise my books perfectly, just to roughly group the books so they were a little easier to sort through.

Book Sorting: should it stay or should it go?

After roughly sorting my books by genre, I tried to pick out my top ten books from each. These were obviously ten that wouldn’t be going in the purge! For some categories, this top ten was all I allowed myself to keep. If there were 40-something books in the category, I didn’t limit myself to a top ten.

Also, I basically gave myself free reign to keep the entirety of series I liked, because… well, what kind of monster would get rid of part of a series?!

Through this process, I took my 322 books and pared them down to 142. As a notorious hoarder of books, this was a pretty big deal! I know my husband was pretty surprised that I chose to donate so many. Of course, what he’ll come to discover is that this will be my justification for buying up the entirety of my ever-growing TBR list. Gotta fill that newly empty space, right?

My top 10s

In case you’re curious, here are a few of the top tens that I picked out from the different categories of books!

Top 10 General/Historical Fiction

These are all books that I’ve found myself returning to, for one reason or another, and so I couldn’t imagine not having them on my shelf anymore. I saved a couple more from my general contemporary fiction and historical fiction collection, but this category was surprisingly easy to slim down for me. At least once I’d decided to be really tough on it!

Top 10 YA

I read a lot of YA, so there were a lot to choose from here. There are three John Green books in here, because I love everything he’s written. There are also some books that I read when I was quite a bit younger and have kept with me ever since. Like, since I was actually YA age… Lucas and Finding Cassie Crazy fall into this category! There are also some more recent reads, including Clap When You Land, which I only read last week but already know it’s going to be an enduring favourite!

Top 10 Fantasy

Almost all of these were part of series, so I did end up keeping a lot of my fantasy books (plus a few that didn’t make it into the top ten have stayed on the shelves, ready for packing). I absolutely love fantasy with a fairytale angle, which Uprooted and The Bear and the Nightingale have in common. Also the slightly grittier fantasy of The Poppy War or The Fifth Season is really interesting!

How often do you do a big book sort?

Do you have a strategy for approaching it? Or are you better than me at getting rid of old books that you’re done with? Let me know in the comments!