Tag: bookshelves

It was this or a bigger house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading6 Comments

I have all the books.

Wait.

I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”

I have all the books. Do you understand?

And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.

This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.

So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:

along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.

We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.

Monthly Reads: August 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

Depressing, I know, but remember I stared an 800-page history of London on July 31 and school started this month, so it’s not quite as depressing as it looks.

Book of the Month is Shroud, which I guess I should have reviewed.

Unread Shelf: July 31, 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

Did I rearrange this shelf hoping to hide the fact that there are more books on it than there were last month?

…maybe. I might have done that.

Unread Shelf: April 30, 2025

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A little better than last month? At least there are no books in front of books. Man, I need to do nothing but read this summer.

Go ‘way, I’m sleepin

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

My sole accomplishment this weekend, if you want to grant it that status, was taking this spinning bookshelf out of its box (fresh from the TikTok shop!) and putting it together, which means that I now have this little spot for all of my YA books, or at least I have this little spot for all the YA books I have right now, because I’m going to outgrow it in about five more books. It’s pretty and colorful, though, and the fact that every book on there but one is exactly the same size grants it a really pleasing symmetry. I’ve said this before; there is a difference between being a reader and a book collector, and I am very much both of those things.

That’s about all I did. I’m about halfway through R.R. Virdi’s The Doors of Midnight, which is 800 pages long so it’s taking me a while, but I took one pill on Friday night because I was having trouble sleeping and it knocked me on my ass for a day and a half. So there’s not much else of note worth talking about at the moment.

This happened Friday at work, so I can’t count it as an achievement, but I’ve got all of my classes planned out through December 4th, an event so rare that, statistically speaking, it didn’t actually happen. Any number of things can upset my plan (which is why I’m never planned out this far ahead; it’s mostly pointless) but we’re in a sort of autopilot-type unit right now, where C has to follow B which has to follow A, and the only real changes that could happen is delays either due to school closings, further sickness, or my kids just not getting something, and then really all I have to do is back everything up a day, which is no big deal. There are seven instructional days until Thanksgiving; I have no plans for Thanksgiving and we likely won’t make any either, since Bek’s family is the weekend before Thanksgiving and my family is the weekend after Thanksgiving. So that weekend will probably be filled with Lego, reading and video games and not so much massive amounts of food. But I have to survive that long first. We’ll see.

Additional hotness of the new variety

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading4 Comments

If you’ve been around here for any length of time– five days would do it– you have certainly seen at least a variant of this picture, my four Nice Bookshelves that are in my living room and are currently dedicated at least mostly to series fiction. The bottom shelves are an exception, partially, but whatever.

A few weeks ago I discovered what I thought was a spectacular sale at the furniture store I worked at– not quite, but almost, half off of these exact same bookshelves. So this has happened:

Hello, Gideon. Hello, The Boy’s toes.

So we’re back to having seven bookshelves in this room again, which I … think is probably the end of it, because of the extra room the sectional takes up compared to the sofa we had before? But who knows. At any rate, these are not precisely identical to the bookshelves we had before, because they weren’t on sale– these come unassembled, and that’s why they were cheaper. That rather tedious process has been my job for the last few days. That said, once put together, they look identical, and they’re quite solidly put together as well– these are absolutely not Wal-Mart $40 specials like the other bookshelves in the house and I have no reason to not believe they’ll last just as long as the ones we spent more money on.

We used my wife’s nice big new car to deliver a shitton of styrofoam and cardboard to our local recycling/hazardous waste facility today and I’ve got all the shelves where I want them. I have two days of vacation left and by the time school starts back up I want my books organized properly again. Right now the theme is “only fiction in the living room” and “only nonfiction in the library … other than the leatherbounds,” but we’ll see.

I’ll post more pictures once everything is properly organized.

A supposedly fun thing I’m never doing again

On By Luther M. SilerIn artLeave a comment

My apologies to David Foster Wallace, but never has a stolen (and lightly edited) headline been more appropriate for one of my posts, and I’m including the time I ripped off Roger Ebert.

If you spend time on TikTok, and specifically if you spend time on TikTok interacting with book accounts (“BookTok”), you have absolutely seen some ads for these cool little bookend diorama things at some point or another. I tried to find the actual ad so that I could embed it and was unsuccessful; it’s basically a video of someone putting the thing together with — and this is important — lots of satisfying-sounding clicks and snaps as he puts things together. 

TikTok’s algorithm has me dialed in in a way I have never seen from any form of advertising before, guys. I have bought more shit because I saw it in an ad on TikTok than I have from any advertising source ever, and it’s not close. Do you happen to remember that metal scorpion from last summer? TikTok. The brand of shoes I’ve been wearing for the last, like, three years? TikTok. My wife? TikTok.

Okay, maybe not that one.

I had previously opened the box for my library bookend and closed it back up three or four times, having forgotten every time just how much a pain in the ass the initial few pages of the instructions looked to be. You see, there’s no clicking anywhere in this build. No snapping. What there is, is a whole fuckton of gluing. God, so much gluing. And cutting with scissors. And more gluing. And sanding. And holding things together at precisely the right angle until the glue sets. And more gluing.

Those books up there? That took three and a half hours. Each of those books is a separate piece of wood, which had to be popped out of a larger piece of wood, sanded down, and then the individual covers had to be cut apart with scissors, and then the covers had to be glued to the pieces of wood, and then the individual books had to be glued together to make the piles, meaning that 90% of the art on the book covers was going to be be completely obscured. All of those books have full front and back covers! You’ll never see them, because they’re glued to each other!

And then, because that wasn’t enough, there are the books in front, which are made by taking a 10″ piece of full-color printed paper, spindling it together to make mock pages, then gluing that together and gluing it inside a book cover, meaning that the books will never be opened, and the, again, legitimately cool designs on the pages will never be seen. That barrel in the back? Two pieces of wood glued together, then four full-cover newspaper pages (well, one was a map and one was, rather inexplicably, a massively oversized postcard) that had to be cut out, rolled as tightly as possible (I’m actually kind of proud of how good a job I did rolling them) and then glued in such a way that they won’t unroll when placed inside the barrel. Again, 90% of the art will never be seen.

I originally planned to finish this thing today and then do a post about the entire build, but again: that was three and a half hours and it was tedious as fuck. The rest of the build, in theory, looks more fun, and I’ve put some of the furniture and such together, but … Christ. This had better look Goddamned amazing when I’m finished with it. 

The final piece

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ReadingLeave a comment

I have had a plan to replace the bookshelves in the living room— now, if you’ll recall, in the room that used to be the dining room– with higher-quality, real wood, 7 foot bookshelves for literally as long as I’ve lived in this house, and 2022 has been the first year in a long time that wasn’t utter shit, so we finally have the money to invest in something that’s going to last: thus these four new shelves, which magically match the paint in the living room perfectly and are finally going to give my books some breathing room.

Goal for 2023: write shorter fucking sentences. Christ. At any rate in the last couple of months we’ve recarpeted, bought a new sectional, and now put in the new shelves, so the living room looks completely different. And much awesomer.

I’m not close to being done to shelving these– that’ll take a day or two at least, and there’s a bunch of books I need to find, as the old shelves didn’t exactly get moved in careful order– but that can be my project for the next couple of days. I’ll post again when they’re done.

That Lego set on the second shelf was one of my son’s gifts and it’s there because we’re guarding it from the cats until he’s done building it. I’m going to need to find cool bookends in the meantime; I don’t want these to end up covered in knickknacks but I also want to leave some space on all of them. That’ll be a fun Amazon/Etsy search, I think.

The typical assortment of end-of-year posts will start soon; I think the book I just finished is going to make it to the best-of list, though, so that one probably won’t be for a while. I find myself in the odd position of having not hit my reading goal for the year, so I need to finish two books at least before I can write anything about what I read this year. I’ll find something else to talk about in the meantime.