A few days ago I started pulling books from my personal library for a new project. I don’t currently have my physical books in a specific order, mainly organizing by size, and enjoy the fact that books I have placed next to each other form unexpected conversations with each other.
This time as I was pulling books, it became clear that many of the books I needed only existed on my Kindle or in my Audible account and I could not remember their titles. Unlike the physical books, I could not simply wander around the house until I found them.
This led me to realize that I finally need a cataloging system for my books, not just the cookbooks which I enter into my Eat Your Books account to find specific recipes. While scanning my physical books into my lapsed Library Thing account went quickly, requiring limited thought, entering my Kindle books became more time-consuming and required more thought.
Essentially, the issue became do I enter all the ebooks, or only the ones relevant to my professional work. That led to thinking about if I was ashamed that my public-facing catalog would include romances at a variety of heat levels and cozy mysteries. I noticed that I didn’t question if I should include thrillers and books often coded as male-interest. Also, at some level, all books possibly relate to food studies, and many of the mysteries and romance novels touch on food (my area of study) than thrillers. Was it simply that I was ashamed of being someone who reads genre books when stressed? I enjoy cozy mysteries and romances because it is about journeying to a known ending. I enjoy science fiction because the authors state the rules of their book’s worlds, which often needed to be guessed in real life.
In the end, I am cataloging everything, partially because I enjoy looking at the Library Thing charts and grafts of my personal library, and also feel it is important to show that I not only performatively read, but enjoy a variety of material.