Bookshelf Tour

Hello there.

I thought about doing a bookshelf tour when I first started this blog, and then my friend Rebecca from This Booky Place did an excellent tour of her own bookshelves last week, that you can find here and I was inspired to actually do it.

I'll be moving in the next few months, so this is something I'd like to revisit once I'm settled in my new place, and see how things change.

 So I currently have two Billy bookcases in my bedroom, and they are pretty much full, so I'm hoping I'll have space for a third when I move.

The top shelf on the first bookcase has most of my newest books on here, which tend to be the YA/MG stuff I've started reading in the last six months of so. The only book on the top shelf I owned a year ago was American Gods! The Victoria Aveyard books are all signed, as is The Girl of Ink and Stars and It Only Happens in the Movies.

The next one down has all my George R R Martin books, the Karin Slaughter crime novels I got really into one summer a few years ago, and some more YA books that are still tbr. The three on the right hand side are my signed Laura Lam books.

I love POP Funkos, but right now these are the only four I've got. I'm definitely looking to add to the collection, if anyone is ever wondering what to buy me for a present? Chewie and Yoda are guarding some of my Warhammer 40k novels. Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series is like a sci-fi Sharpe, and is excellent. Luke is defending my Southern Mysteries (True Blood) collection, and Wicket is looking after some of my favourite books that just didn't fit in anywhere else.

The next shelf has the few ARCs I've had so far and my incomplete collection of The Wheel of Time. I still need to buy the last two volumes, but annoyingly they've changed the design, so they won't quite match up! A couple of pictures of my kids here too. The Fandom ARC is signed actually.

These bookshelves always leave you with at least one tiny shelf, and luckily I have some tiny books to fill it! The fifth shelf down has my Manga collection, the Lone Wolf and Cub series, about a wandering samurai with a baby in a baby cart, and a follow up series Samurai Executioner. I lost a few of the volumes to damp while my books were being stored in my ex-wife's garage, so I need to refill a few gaps.

Then we have another collection of Warhammer 40k novels, these are the Horus Heresy series. I was really into Warhammer as a kid, and though I haven't played in years I do still enjoy a lot of the stories, especially these ones exploring areas I'd always heard about but which had never been fully explained.

Getting to the bottom now, and we have a wide shelf, for books that just don't fit anywhere. My William Gibson novels are here, some Alternate Reality Gaming stuff with Perplex City, and my collection of Alice in Wonderland books.

Then right at the bottom we have my Discworld novels. I don't currently have any before Soul Music. That was the first hardback one I bought, when it first came out, so everything before that I picked up in paperback, and then got rid of when my wife and I had the exact same books. Interesting Times and Feet of Clay are both signed.

Time for the second bookshelf. This starts with my collection of birding, walking and other nature books. Then we have most of my crime novels, from Sherlock Holmes, through the hard-boiled noir of Chandler and Hammett to the more modern stuff. Also, my juggling balls live here.

The serious academic shelf is the next ones down, everything from classical philosophy through Roman historiography. Then we've got a bit of classic literature and serious novels. There's also a set of devil sticks.

Then we have the beautiful, serious books of the Penguin Great Ideas series, some little biblical books from Pocket Canons. Those white ones are a set of Banned Books that the Independent published a while ago. There's some really interesting stuff in there, everything from Tom Sawyer to Clockwork Orange, Madame Bovary to Leonard Cohen. They've all been banned somewhere. The little boxes are mostly empty I think, but they're cute.

The next shelf holds Sci-Fi and Fantasy Masterworks, with H P Lovecraft keeping them apart. Some fantastic, epic stuff here, though again I lost some of them to damp.

Then there's another awkward little space. Luckily my OS maps fit into it perfectly, though the piles of bus timetables and nature reserve leaflets always need a tidy.

Bottom shelves, and this one probably has the most random collection of stuff on it, including Red Dwarf, politics and pillow books. I should probably free up some of this shelf space.

Then right at the bottom we have another space for taller books. Some Warhammer rulebooks I just can't part with, what's left of my graphic novel collection (mostly lost to damp), my dictionary and bible and anything else that literally won't fit anywhere. One of these is a yoga book with illustrations by Corky Paul actually, that I really love but never use.

Now the sexy stuff! On the opposite wall I have three floating bookshelves. One holds my Long Earth series, another my Tolkien books. The third currently has a few Pratchett and Gaiman books, along with my signed collectors edition of A Darker Shade of Magic by V E Schwab. In between them is a portrait of me my cousin made me, two bird pictures by my friend Alan Mould, some Pixar postcards I got years ago at a Science Museum exhibition, the aesthetic Lia made me for Mab, my WiP, and a few other things. And where do the dandelion seeds come from? 

This is my little reading corner.