Which Bookshelf?

Your Monday Photo Assignment: Show us what's in your bookshelf right now. That's right, right this very second!

Oh, the things I do for you guys! Or, more likely, to satisfy my obsessions and feed my ego. You've seen pictures of bookcases at Casa Blocher before. More than likely, you've seen most of these very same books in those pictures. Nevertheless, despite the fact that most of these new photos are almost identical to the old ones in content, despite the fact that I'm woefully out of practice using the old Mavica, I took the pictures anyway. Here's what I had to do to get these lousy, blurry, repetitive photos to you:

1. Find a floppy that was neither completely full nor unreadable.
2. Put it in the Mavica.
3. Light up each bookcase as best I could.
4. Take flash pictures.
5. Find another working floppy, because the first one was full now.
6. Take the last two photos.
7. Put the floppies in my purse, and hope I didn't wreck 'em.
8. Drive to work, park, get in with my security pass, go upstairs.
9. Transfer files from 2002 through 2006 from floppies into a folder on my desktop at work.
10. Sign into AOL.
11. Use the AOL Web mail client to email the files home, eight files at a time in six emails.
12. Drive home.
13. Download the files from email and organize them into folders - old school stuff, old web stuff, 2002 pictures, 2006 pictures.
14. Edit the 2006 photo files, while getting bummed out at their poor quality.
15. Start writing the blog entry in Composer, because Blogger is apparently down again.
16. Upload the photos to mavarin.com, because I don't trust Blogger right now.
17. Force quit Netscape, which froze up, and hope to heck I could "recover post" from I.E. Yay! It worked! Oh, foo. Half of it's missing.

Now my question is, what bookshelf do you have in mind? There's the built-in bookcase in my office, the one with the L'Engle books, the rare T.H. White books and the neglected accounting review books:

And there are two bookcases in the den, one of which is currently buried behind boxes of stuff that came out of storage while John does some wallpapering. The one on the right is currently visible, though:

From our "Museum of the Weird" file, I'd like to point out the Better Homes and Gardens barbecue and decorating books from circa 1960 (middle shelf on the left), birding books, some rare Ellisons (Harlan, not Ralph, top shelf), and retro books with titles like Atomic Home and Tiki Road Trip (middle shelf, middle).

There's more cool stuff in the living room and bedroom bookcases, but it's almost midnight, and the computer ate my descriptions.

Bedroom: mostly Tolkien and other fantasy.

Living room: Doctor Who and Quantum Leap.

Living room, second bookcase: Tiki mugs, Chevron cars, Piers Anthony, Peanuts & Babylon 5 books, and Ranma 1/2 videos. Ranma is about a boy who turns into a girl when he gets wet. (And his father turns into a panda, one of his fiancees becomes a cat, and his rival turns into a little black pig!)

Not shown here are the bookshelves in my office closet, where the McCaffrey books are; the room divider in the living room, where most of the Thurber and Disney books are; John's bookcases in his office and the bedroom; my two bookcases full of tv scripts and magazines and oversided Doctor Who books; innumerable books in boxes, even after several major purges; a couple stacks of unshelved books in my office; and the No Frills Book: Science Fiction paperback in the bathroom.

And for all that, I haven't satisfied John Scalzi's original question, which is, "So, what are you reading? I want the visual evidence." If it's on a bookshelf, I'm not currently reading it. The two Meg Cabot books I just read or reread are floating around the house, waiting to be put away. The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, which I started reading the night the latest Harry Potter came out, but didn't actually buy until months later, is, well, um...I think it's probably under these church bulletins and other papers on my desk. And I'm halfway through the so-called "generic" sf parody book.

The book I'm actively reading right now is The House Teridel (working title) by Sara G. I'm beta reading it, demanding more scenes as fast as Sara can turn them out. Although she had the basic idea for the story years ago, she just started actually writing it in novel form this past fall, and just passed 100,000 words of manuscript. And I tell you honestly, if The Tengrim Sword was as good in its first full draft as this is turning out to be, it would have been published years ago. Brava, Sara!

Karen