Tag: personal home library

Plans for My Personal Home Library

If everyone has a weird or quirky super power, mine is the ability to acquire books. Even when I was living out of a suitcase in a remote Caucasian village, or traipsing across the Middle East, I was constantly acquiring books.

With my marriage to Future Mrs. Vasicek coming up, I’ve decided to put this super power to use. Instead of acquiring books randomly, I’m approaching the task of building a personal library with goals and a plan. Part of that plan is to inventory all of the books that I own, with lists of books / ebooks / audiobooks that I want to acquire. Part of it is to find a place in my home where I can shelve them all, instead of keeping them in boxes or the closet. And another part is categorizing all of the books, with goals for each category.

Requirements

After putting some thought into it, here are my basic requirements:

  • The entire library must fit in a single room / device / server.
  • The only books that I’ll keep are ones that:
    • I want to read again,
    • I want to talk about with others, or
    • I want to share with my family.
  • Ebooks and audiobooks must be DRM-free and device agnostic.

A while ago, I did a blog post on the pros and cons between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. That seems to be a pretty good set of criteria for determining which formats to collect my books in, or whether to collect a particular book in multiple formats.

Ideally, I want to set up my personal library in a shared space in my home, where I can host guests. Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are going to get a set of scriptures, kind of like the tradition of a family bible, and I want this to be the centerpiece of my personal library. Eventually, I also want to get a dedicated ereader (or set of ereaders) that lives in the library, as well as a portable hard drive for all of the audiobooks. I don’t want any of it to depend on the cloud.

Categories

So far, I’ve got eight categories, though I’m sure this will expand. They are:

  1. Science fiction & fantasy
  2. Other fiction
  3. LDS non-fiction
  4. Self-improvement
  5. Writing & publishing
  6. Arabic language
  7. History & current events
  8. Other non-fiction

I have a lot more fiction books than non-fiction (go figure). For now, I’m using Goodreads as a library inventory system, though I may want to find something better in the future. If you check out my Goodreads profile, you can probably see all of them.

I’m working to come up with goals and plans for each category. Here’s what I have so far:

Science Fiction & Fantasy

My main goal here is to collect the complete works of David Gemmell. He is my favorite fantasy writer of all time, and I’ve read all of the Drenai series and most of the Stones of Power and the Rigante series as well. I’m holding off on the Troy books, mostly because I want to savor them. He’s also got a few standalones and duologies, most of which I’ve read.

Other series that I want to collect in print are:

  • Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series
  • All of Heinlein’s juveniles
  • The Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Princess of Mars, etc)
  • Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle
  • All of the books by my writer friends

There are also a bazillion trilogies that I either own or want to collect, but it’s not worth listing them all here. I’m sure this is going to be a very dynamic part of my personal library.

Other Fiction

My main goal for this section right now is to collect all of the Sackett books by Louis L’Amour. There are only two left, both of which I’ve requested on Paperback Swap. Now I get to read them all, without any interruption!

I also plan to focus on collecting Jeff Shaara, especially the Civil War books. I currently have The Killer Angels by his father, as well as Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. But before that, I need to read Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause, which I also own (those ones cover the Revolutionary War). Depending on how much I enjoy those, I’ll decide whether to collect Shaara’s complete works.

LDS Non-fiction

There are a tone of authors that I want to collect in this section: Nibley, Givens, Gileadi, Groberg, and more. There are also a few key books that I need to acquire and read, mostly biographies and church histories.

One series that I’m really looking forward to is the four book SAINTS series published by the church. The first book was fantastic; I listened to the whole thing on the train, and it was really cool to pick out the people from my own family history and learn how they contributed to the rise of the church. The next book is going to cover the westward migration, and I have a bunch of ancestors who participated in that, including a few in the Willie handcart company. Really looking forward to it!

Here in Utah, it isn’t difficult to collect LDS non-fiction books. You can find most of the older titles in thrift stores, and there are lots of LDS bookstores to choose from. That said, I don’t have any concrete goals for this section yet. The biggest challenge will probably be in refining this section so that I only keep the best books (ha), since it would be very easy to let this section get cluttered with good but mediocre books. That seems to be the general trend.

Self-Improvement

The biggest thing I need to do in this section is reread How to Win Friends and Influence People, preferably once a year. Fantastic book.

I should also probably focus on marriage and relationship books, since y’know, I’m getting married. Personal finance is also huge: I’ve got Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and should probably collect all of Kiyosaki’s books. Stephen Covey is another huge one.

Beyond that, my cowriter Scott Bascom is really into self-improvement, so my plan for now is to build out this section based on his recommendations.

Writing & Publishing

There are a few classics that I need to re-acquire, such as Character and Viewpoint and On Writing. One classic that I will probably skip is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (can’t stand that pretentious book). Other than that, the biggest thing is to stay current and focus on indie publishing. For that reason, I suspect that I’ll collect mostly ebooks in this section.

Arabic Language

My main goal here is to read The Book of Mormon (كتاب مورمون) in Arabic. I also have plans to study the Qur’an, though that’s not a priority at the moment.

Most of these books are ones that I acquired while studying Arabic in Jordan. I don’t think I’ll acquire many more anytime soon, though if an opportunity arises, I probably won’t turn it down. The big question in my mind is whether to expand this section to Arabic language & culture, since I do have a bunch of English books on the Middle East.

History & Current Events

My biggest goal for this section is to build a collection of monetary & financial books that together make a complete history of the United States. This subject is my current pet interest, much to Future Mrs. Vasicek’s chagrin. I also have plans for a coin collection / history that I’m currently writing, though that’s on the back burner for now.

Other than that, I plan to focus on book recommendations by Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck.

Other non-fiction

No real goals yet for this section. At some point, I will probably spin off family histories as a separate category, since there are a lot of them in my family.

General Goals

The biggest thing I need to do is read every book that I own. I may be really good at acquiring books, but I’m not as good at actually reading them. Currently, I’ve read only about 20% of them.

When will I have them all read by? Ideally, the end of the year, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Then again, if I can keep my goal to read for an hour or two each night, a year might just be enough.

Since the library is constantly growing, though, I suspect this will be more of an aspirational goal, or a moving target. Even when I manage to hit it, it probably won’t take long before I acquire more books and have more reading to do again.

The next big goal is to find a place for all these books, which probably won’t happen until after Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are married. At which point, all of these plans may change, since she has a bunch of books too—but probably not too much. We’ve talked about it, and it shouldn’t be too hard to merge our books into one family library, if that is what we decide to do.

Aside from that, I’d like to get as many books signed and personalized as I can. Shouldn’t be too hard: just look up the guest list of any convention I’m attending, and bring the books along.

That’s basically the plan as it stands right now. With my quirky super power for acquiring books, it shouldn’t take long to build an epic personal/family library.

Pros and Cons: Print Books vs. Ebooks vs. Audiobooks

One of the long-term things I want to do is build a home library. Last weekend, I started cataloging my books and putting together plans for how to do that. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about that in the future, but the big question at the start of it was this:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each book format?

So I spent some time thinking about it, as well as browsing the internet to get other people’s thoughts and perspectives. There are three major formats for books now: print, ebook, and audio. Here, as best as I can tell, are the major pros and cons with each:

Print Books

Pros:

  • Ownership. If it’s physically in your possession, then you are the undisputed owner of that book.
  • No screens, batteries, or power requirements. Does not require a device to use.
  • Easy to share with others (though there is a risk that they won’t return it! See ownership above).
  • High visibility. Because of this, print books can be symbols of status or social reputation. They also are much harder to ignore once you put them in a TBR pile.

Cons:

  • Space intensive. You have to find a place for them.
  • Heavy, especially when boxed in large numbers.
  • Prone to damage, such as water damage, parasites, etc.
  • Requires shelving to properly store and display.

Ebooks

Pros:

  • Portability. Fits onto your everyday carry (EDC) device, such as a phone or tablet, as well as a dedicated ereader.
  • Requires very little storage space, both physically (on a device) and digitally (small file sizes).
  • Cheap, at least for indie published books.
  • Can read more easily at night, depending on the device.
  • Privacy. It’s easier to hide an ebook from people than it is to hide a print book, or even an audiobook.

Cons:

  • Ownership is ambiguous at best. Do you own your ebook files outright, or do you own a license to use the files? Can Amazon (or whatever site you bought the ebooks from) remove the books from your device at their discretion? It’s been done before!
  • Requires a screen or device to use.
  • Difficult (though not impossible) to share. There is a kindle lending library, but I’ve never used it, and in the handful of instances where I’ve tried, I eventually gave up trying to figure it out. Copying and sideloading is possible, but tricky. Much easier to pull a print book off the shelf and hand it to somebody.

Audiobooks

Pros:

  • Can listen while doing other things, especially driving or mindless chores.
  • Can also fit into the little gaps in your schedule, turning time that would otherwise be wasted into reading time.
  • Listening is a more passive exercise than reading. This can be a con as well as a pro.
  • Fits easily onto a phone or other EDC device, giving it many of the same portability advantages of ebooks.

Cons:

  • Takes longer to read. You can speed up the narration, but it’s not as easy or efficient as skimming a book.
  • More expensive than the other formats. An exception might be for rare or out-of-print books that aren’t available in digital.
  • Larger files, which take up more storage space. You can easily keep a large library of ebooks on one device, but you’d need a server or a dedicated hard drive to do the same with a large library of audiobooks.
  • Ownership is ambiguous. See above.

What are your thoughts? Let me know!