What’s on My Shelf?

This week my accountability group is blogging about what our bookshelves are like and which authors have influenced us. Last week’s post on Hobbies is also part of our How I Write series.

My husband and I are bona fide bibliophiles. Movers hate us because we have so many books. We just lost a large built-in shelf at the old house last Spring, so we’re in the process of converting the majority of our shelving into double-stacked shelves where you can read both spines. We bought 4×4′s at Home Depot and had them cut to length. Not the prettiest in some places, but functional and needed.

I think we’d be quite happy with a house like the one on the right (BTW – You can click on any of the images to enlarge them!). As it is, we have covered 2 windows with bookshelves and turned the common wall of the dining room and family room into one long shelf unit for books, movies and games. We keep joking that we need to find a library branch that’s closing and tell them don’t move anything, we’ll just move in around the existing shelves and books. Needless to say, after a couple of moves, we’re tired of not being able to put our hands on a book easily. We have roughly 76 – 40″ shelves and 45 – 20″ shelves full. This works out to 3940 linear inches or 328 linear feet of books! No. We have no idea how many individual books that comes to.

But let’s take a closer look at my romance shelves. These I have separated out and organized. I’ve put all my Historical Romances which are set mostly during the Regency on a 40″ bookcase. If we wanted to name favorite authors, there are quite a few: Victoria Alexander, Mary Balogh, Shirlee Busbee, Suzanne Enoch, Galen Foley, Karen Hawkins, Eloisa James, Sabrina Jeffries, Lisa Kleypas, Stephanie Laurens, Amanda Quick, and Julia Quinn. I’ve also picked up some new favorites: Tessa Dare, Anna Campbell, Joanna Bourne, and Anne Gracie.

I love authors with big sprawling series like JQ’s Bridgertons, SL’s Cynsters and Enoch’s books which have a few token characters who return on the fringes book after book. Love the inter-connectedness that makes it feel like a coherent society.

The Contemporary Romance & Paranormal Romance books are on a 20″ bookcase. Janet Evanovich amuses me, both with her old contemporary romances — it’s fun to see where she was practicing with certain characters — and the Stephanie Plum series. I’m so not sold on who they picked for Ranger in the movie either. Anyway…my other go to authors for contemporary are Suzanne Brockmann, Jennifer Crusie and Louisa Edwards.

For some reason, all my Lynn Kurland time-travel books seem to be on the historical shelf, instead of with the contemporary/paranormal ones. I think this is because they scream historical to me even if the couple ends up in modern times at the end of the book. I know where to look for them anyway.

I also read a lot of YA in hopes of getting my daughter interested in ones beyond what’s just wildly popular (She hated Twilight, LOVED Hunger Games) and I’ve had limited success with that since she’s crazy into anime and manga. On the other hand, I’ve had great success in finding fun and entertaining authors for myself like Rosemary Clement-Moore and Tera Lynn Childs. DH is the one who reads SF/F so has introduced us to Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) and Scott Westerfeld (The Midnighters Series, Pretties/Uglies/Specials and Leviathan/Behemoth/Goliath) and he’s had some success in getting me and our son to read them. The boy is happily reading a string of 19th century stories and novels like Frankenstein. Don’t think I can sell him on Jane Austen though.

I’m also falling behind in my reading. While I was tracking on GoodReads, I was reading about 2-3 books a week. I should go back to doing that again, it was fun to see everything back-to-back in a list like that. But from this shelf, the proportions are fairly well represented: mostly Regency set historicals, 3 other. What you can’t see behind there are craft books (read) and some reference books (most read).

I hope you enjoyed this little tour of my books.

YOUR TURN: Who are your favorite authors? What do you recommend that I add to my TBR pile now that you’ve seen what I like?

And if you’d like to read about what the rest of my group does when they’re not writing, you can find their blogs here:

* Alexia Reed * Angeleque Ford * Danie Ford *
* Emma G. Delaney * Kimberly Farris *