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How do you organize your books?

Most of them are organized with sinister precision by genre and author, except that biographies are by subject and history is roughly chronological. I cant help it; Im a librarian. Not only that, but I tend to spot anomalies. If someone has moved a book out of order, I fix it with my gimlet eye almost as soon as I walk in the room. Of course, this leads to people moving my books around for fun, to see if Ill notice. (And sometimes I dont.)

Every year, I receive a book of stories, memoirs, drawings or clerihews, as well as a wall-calendar of splendid literary caricatures, all created by my generous and gifted friend in Seattle, Brad Craft. Nothing can ever beat that.

As a child I read books manically, greedily and repeatedly, and loved anything with an animal in it. My two favorite series were Willard Prices gung-ho stories about two brothers collecting wild creatures for their fathers zoo, and the Adventure series by Enid Blyton, which sent four children and a parrot into dangerous situations up a river, out to sea, inside a hollow mountain and away with a traveling circus.

By my early teens, I was grabbing any book for adults that came within my reach, and making whatever skewed, half-baked sense of it I could. Woolfs The Waves, Nabokovs Lolita, Ginsbergs Howl, Luke Rhineharts The Dice Man, David Nivens The Moons a Balloon, a bit of Shakespeare it all went into the ravenous maw. I do remember being more perplexed than usual by The Sex-Life Letters: Fascinating Correspondence From Todays Men and Women About the Variety of Their Sexual Attitudes and Experiences, edited by Harold and Ruth Greenwald. I think that had animals in it too.

Ive long liked both philosophy and biography, but the balance keeps shifting toward the biography end. In my 20s, a night in with Heidegger was my idea of fun. Now, given a choice between contemplating the being of beings and finding out, for example, that Vita Sackville-Wests mother once papered an entire room with used postage stamps well, its the stamps every time.

More here:
By the Book: Sarah Bakewell Is No Fan of Thrillers and Mysteries - The New York Times