Completed books have been piling up on the library shelves for a few months, so I decided to dedicate an hour this morning to get things cleaned up. Now that my collection has started to grow, I started by organizing the shelves in order of when I completed the books so that it would be easier to transfer when I move to a new year in the next few years.
Moving forward, adding a book to the “completed” shelf will involve a little process: a stamp, a cover, a hand-written note, and updating my marble jar. It may seem a little tedious and a touch of overkill, but there’s a method to the madness! The stamp inside the book distinguishes it from others in my library as part of this project. The cover provides a visual design element in the library that will ultimately be part of a large wall designed exclusively with books when I move. The note on the hand-made white dust jacket marks the finish order, month, and year the book was completed for easy post-move reorganization. Finally, the marble jar gets a new addition and the numbers are updated for current counts.
Here are the books completed that filled shelf #2:
- 27 Beloved | Toni Morrison (December 2016)
- 28 The Call of the Wild | Jack London (January 2017)
- 29 Middlemarch | George Eliot (February 2017)
- 30 A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking (March 2017)
- 31 Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy (March 2017)
- 32 To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf (April 2017)
- 33 The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood (April 2017)
- 34 Bel Canto | Ann Patchett (May 2017)
- 35 The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemmingway (June 2017)
- 36 Dracula | Bram Stoker (June 2017)
- 37 Animal Farm | George Orwell (June 2017)
- 38 The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood (June 2017)
- 39 David Copperfield | Charles Dickens (July 2017)
- 40 The Power of One | Bryce Courtney (August 2017)
- 41 Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides (August 2017)
- 42 Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe (August 2017)
- 43 1984 | George Orwell (October 2017)
- 44 The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales | Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (October 2017)
- 45 Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen (December 2017)
- 46 Alice in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll (January 2018)
- 47 The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (January 2018)
- 48 The Time Machine | H.G. Wells (February 2018)
I have gone back to my Shelf #1 List and updated it for consistency with this new methodology so that there is an accurate record of the completion timeline, even if the original photos don’t 100% match. On to filling Shelf #3 in 2018! Click here for The Complete 350 Book List to follow along!
