The bulb has gone again, the second overhead one in the living room. This, by the way, is the second death in the life of the other bulb, which either makes the one near the bookshelf - the one that’s gone again - a premature death, or either the first bulb – the one near the couch – a surprisingly healthy breed. I don’t know why it always has to be that one. I like to turn the one beside the bookshelf on, along with the little lamp beside the television, when I’m sitting on the couch with a cup of tea or watching television. It’s something to do with ambience. The one that’s still good is too stark to have on all the time like this. It feels a bit like the lights in the classroom in Queens where I have both seminars this semester – those bright clinical florescents that give too much light.

The lights were one of the first things I liked about this room, though. They have uplighters, which means the light shines in a sweeping hoop from the ceiling instead of from a suspended bulb. To be honest, what first struck me about the lights was the fact that the two light switches are the wrong way around. The switch on the left controls the light beside the bookcase, which is on the right side of the room, and vice versa. This idiosyncrasy reaches right down into that OCD place in my stomach that rebels against such idiocy. It’s the same thing that makes me cringe at the line of Margaret Forster books at eye-level in Waterstones while E.M. Forster is relegated to toe-level, the two separated by Fowles, Fry and Fuller. I wonder how much of this gut reaction to disorderliness is innate and how much is conditioned. Have I been taught to put the shampoo bottle back on the shelf with the label facing outwards or to shift the vertical blinds so that each one overlaps the same amount, or is this something I inherited from my parents? It’s quite possibly the latter; my parents are relatively orderly people. Everything has a place. Mind you, my obsessive behaviour tends to display itself far more on bookshelves, and I completely rebel against my mother’s bookshelf strategies. Who ever thought of putting all the white books together? If I did that my DK guides would be beside the Cordon Bleu cookbook and Lolita; Dickens and Shakespeare would be shoulder to shoulder with the Bible and W.H. Auden.

Since it’s World Book Day, perhaps I’ll dwell on this a little more, because, now that I think about it, organising a bookshelf has been one of my principle joys in life since I was a child. Periodically I would take all the books from my shelf, categorise, alphabetise, sort and stack, and carefully line them up together. Oversize were happily married, but otherwise there was a strict regime. Over the years, particularly the last few with all the moves (most of these moves involving a suitcase of books), I have honed the book-sorting strategy. Top shelf always begins with religion and philosophy. The Bible starts things off, followed by A World of Ideas, The History of Knowledge, and all those far-reaching guides to human thought (culminated in The Imagineering Way, the Disney guide to life, far more useful than any Seven Habits). Then come biographies and letters, essays, reference books, lit crit. and writing books, and then travel, the most colourful section, with guides a precursor to literature. History comes before fiction, which wraps onto the top of another shelf and slinks right down to the fifth. This is the most carefully considered shelf. Anne Fadiman has a wonderful essay about marrying libraries with her husband, in which she complains of their contention over whose system of categorisation would work best. Both separated American and British fiction, but she went a little further, parting centuries and genres. I identify with this on two levels. Firstly, when Lori and I pooled our book collections (involving suitcases, again) there was the inevitable odd mingling. While Anne Fadiman and her husband finally resorted to tossing out duplicates, this was obviously not going to happen with friends: our identical copies of Clarissa take up an eighth of a shelf and our Austen collection spans a quarter. But I do separate British from American, classics from modern. I can’t imagine putting Hemingway next to Hardy or McEwan beside du Maurier. So first come British classics, then American, then translations. Drama and poetry separate classics from modern fiction, which is a surprisingly small shelf, since most of the novels I have read are still on my shelf at my parents’ house. I think that’s because there’s little chance of me referring to modern fiction again, whereas I couldn’t leave George or T.S. in my old room. Cookery finishes things off on the oversize shelf, a well-thumbed and splattered collection.

There are times I just sit and stare at the bookshelves. "Billys," Ikea calls them. I remember putting them together with Dad after a trip to Ikea, getting a splinter in my thumb and drinking tea, laughing at how they covered a whole wall and there was no way I would fill them. I’m now thinking I may need another one.

I let my tea go cold, again.