I had to add another shelf to my book wall at home. The top shelf I have for my Bible study tools, and the History of Civilization series of books by Will and Ariel Durant.

Second shelf down is for the Harvard Classics Five-Foot Shelf of Books. It takes up nearly six feet. Liars.

The third and fourth shelves are for my classics, with room I suppose on the fifth when needed. This is the set of books that is growing the fastest. I’ve set myself a goal of reading 50 books this year. I’m on the 35th right now… and I’m not half-way through the year yet. So probably by the end of the year I’ll be encroaching on the 5th shelf down. The books laying on their sides are the ones I have ‘on deck’, which if you don’t know, is a baseball reference for ‘up next’. I try to buy the book I’m planning on reading early, so when I finish a book, I can start right away on the next. Currently on deck are: From Here to Eternity, Little Women, and old copies of Alice in Wonderland and Henry Esmond.

As of now, the fifth shelf is for my books in Italian. Though I have Don Quixote (parts one and two) in parallel English and Spanish at the beginning of the list… so not ALL Italian. I bought the volumes as a replacement for the books that I originally read, but no longer had.

I currently have 28 Italian books on the shelf, and I have another 16 books listed on Amazon.it that I will buy as they come up. I’ve read 11 in the last few years, 9 of them in the last 6 months. The others I had read years ago. I also bought parallel English/Italian versions of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a replacement for the original versions I had gotten rid of years ago. At some point, I’d like to try and reread those, but in Italian this time.

Even adding those 16 other books to the collection wouldn’t fill up that fifth shelf though, so I’ll have room to expand the classics there.

I have another 30 classic books on my ‘to read list’ as of now. But I’m constantly adding to the list as things come up.

The bottom shelf contains some sci-fi books that my wife has read, and my contemporary reading. I have several books that I want to add there too, including both Stephen Kotkin’s works on Stalin, and one on Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism by James Gregor. I also need to add a few P.J.  O’Roarke books to the shelf. I already read ’em… but I think I checked them out from the library back in the day, so I want to get them back in my possession.

I have room for one more shelf underneath. After that, I’d have to start adding shelves on the adjacent wall. Won’t have to worry about that for a few years though.

By the way, I have another 4 shelves of assorted books in my studio closet, containing art books that I used when I was working freelance, one whole shelf of language learning books for Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, and German, all of which I’ve studied to some degree over the years. I have also looked at Romanian, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, none of which I remember much about, but I did briefly study them. Latin, and you’ll love this, I actually wanted to learn so I could call people names like Bigus Moronus while I was driving, and get the inflections and grammatical endings right. This was not a great a particularly profitable use of time, so I gave up. I still think about it every once in a while and giggle though.

I also have spiritual books and other things people have given my over the years, but I don’t necessarily want to bother with displaying those all, so I keep them in the closet.