A tour of my bookshelves
If you search on Instagram or Pinterest for bookshelves, you’ll soon be overwhelmed with hundreds if not thousands of pictures of absolutely gorgeous bookshelves. Organized by colour, decorated so perfectly it makes you cry or make you just a teensy bit jealous.
To deal with this jealousy, I may have ‘reorganized’ my own bookshelves. Like a lot of things I do though, it started out well and quickly descended into what I’ll call organized chaos. Perhaps I just need to get another set of shelves so I can display these beauties properly. No Ikea at the moment though, so I guess this will have to do.
Anyway, enough of that - find out below which and how many books I own and how I have organized and decorated my shelves!
As I mentioned, my attempt at organizing quickly descended into organized chaos and this shelf is the perfect embodiment of that. It has paperbacks and hardcovers, all of which I couldn’t fit anywhere else because they didn’t match the theme, their sizes where off, the colours weren’t right. You catch my drift. It’s my mismatched and misfits shelf.
Yes - I know one of the books from a Song of Ice and Fire is missing! My brother stole it from me about 2 years ago and still has it. Seeing as he lives in the Netherlands and we’re in the middle of a pandemic I am not exactly able to go get it either. Sigh.
As for the decorations, that is definitely a mix of my partner and me. The cottongrass he plucked on the nearby moors when he was younger and has been weirdly protective off since. The Pokeball was a gift from me to him. Since then he has thrown it at my head many times. Annoyingly it’s one of those that is weighted, so it rights itself whenever it hits the ground - which means that bastard packs a punch!
Next up - my shelf of suspense. Ooooh. No really. This shelf has all of my true crime, thriller, suspense, detective-type books. Some which are in Dutch, some of which are in English. It also has the two, yes you read that right, two books that my partner owns. See if you can pick them out.
It also has one of my favourite non-fantasy book series. It’s no secret you should go to the Scandinavian countries for the true gems of the detective books and Stieg Larsson is no exception to this rule. He was a titan of the genre. I remember losing so much sleep as I attempted to tear through all three of the books during a single weekend.
The decorations do go really well with the team - surprisingly because it is mostly things my partner has collected over the years. He used to be a poker dealer, which is where the training chips come from and the flask may or may not contain brandy at any given moment.
Are we there yet? Oh yes, we are, perhaps my favourite shelf in the entire bookcase. My magically wonderful shelf. Where both sets of the Harry Potter books reside. Yes, I am a nerd and yes I need the sets both in Dutch and in English. 10 points to Gryffindor if you can tell me who this wand belongs to. 10 more points if you got roped into paying a ridiculous amount for it in Olivanders in Universal Studios like me!
This reminds me - I should really try to locate my time-turner necklace and my golden snitch bracelet and put them on display. Don’t judge we all had a phase at one point or another!
It also has my classic fairytales, by Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm. It always makes me smile how absurdly different the covers for those two are. Perfectly encapsulates the mood of the stories mind. Of course, I also need to display my Witcher collection on this shelve because, how could you not. How gorgeous is that colour progression on the spines?
3 down - 3 more to go. This shelf has a lot of my incomplete series. Incomplete because I haven’t gone out and bought the book just yet, or incomplete because I am stuck in this agonizing limbo until the next book is released! There is a little gap here where The Poppy War lives, but I am reading that at the moment.
Funny story, I had been eyeing The Priory of the Orange Tree for ages. I’d spotted it in Waterstones a couple of times and was pining after it, but I could never find a good reason to buy it. Other than for the sake of reading it of course. I had a pile of books ‘to-be-read’ as tall as I am so why did I need another book. Until I was in town by myself one afternoon and completely caved. I also bought a board game to ‘hide the shame’ and snuck them in the same bag so I could potentially smuggle it into the house unnoticed. Don’t ask me how I planned on doing that, the thing is the size of a fridge. When I was alone in the living room, I quickly pulled it out of my backpack, the same moment my partner rounded the corner. He took one look at me and knew what I had done. He just rolled his eyes at me and told me: ‘You’re really terrible at this.”
This shelf I am actually quite please with - just because it is aesthetically quite pleasing. All of the paperbacks are the exact. same. size. Except for one - I am looking at you, Legend. It also has my collection of Tolkien books and yes it annoys me immensely they don’t have a common theme when it comes to the covers. There is no consistency, whatsoever.
As for the decorations, not that you can tell from the picture alone. Buried under the collection of bookmarks, courtesy of Chocolate and Book, is a pillowcase my partner had made for me for our first Sinterklaas together (sort of the Dutch precursor to Santa Claus, it’s difficult). It is a perfect map of middle earth, the same one you’ll find in some of the Lord of the Rings Books. Because it was a custom order though, I’ve still not been able to find a pillow that fits it comfortable. So until then, it rests on the shelf, protecting the books.
Finally, as above - so below. This is very much a mismatched, hodgepodge shelf. It has The Maze Runner trilogy, yes that’s Dutch thank you very much. It has some of the Penguin classics. It has the Divergent Series - WHY, why are you all slightly different when it comes to size, font and placing, you’re breaking my heart. It has a lot of the hardcover books I received when I used to get the illumicrate box every quarter.
It has the affiliate Harry Potter books - yes I have the cookbook and the book of insults too, I am not obsessed, you are. It also has The Cursed Child, safely stashed away on the bottom shelf where I don’t have to constantly look at it because I have not forgiven it yet for being such an abomination. Wow, that got a little spiteful there. I guess the beings are fictional, but my anger is very real.
Anyway, there you have it. All the books I currently own - minus the few that are being held hostage at my mother’s house. Perhaps she thinks it is a way of bribing me to come live in the Netherlands again, who knows? What did you think of the books? Are there any glaring gaps, any recommendations based on what you’ve seen so far, have you done a bookshelf tour yourself, all of this and more, please let me know in the comment section below, but until then - just one more page!
