I've been meaning to wander through my bookshelves here for awhile and hope that you will indulge me in this. I love looking at people's bookshelves, and there are few organizing projects I enjoy more than moving my books around and placing them in endlessly esoteric orders that make sense mostly only to me. (On organizing, did you read the last issue of Rolling Stone with the Howard Stern interview? Apparently he loves reading organizing books - who knew?!)

My bookshelves line two walls in my office and include two corner cases on either side. They are seven feet tall, oak and made by my husband. (He's handy that way.) If I manage to clean my office in the near future I'll take a picture of one of the walls, but until then you'll have to stick with me for the shelf-by-shelf survey. I'm starting on the left wall, top shelf.

Up high is a wind-up airplane toy, a couple of military history reference books I've had since college and still refer to (I used them constantly when teaching) and a piece of a B-17 that crashed in AK during WWII (it was part of the lend lease program going to Russia). It was pulled out in pieces in the mid-90s when I was working at the company (it was going to be cannibalized to help complete another B-17 in a museum). A US Postal Inspector we had been flying back and forth who was working the murder case of a postal employee in the village of Ruby (no joke) saw the plane parts on the beach when they pulled it in and grabbed this for me. We talked everyday when he flew in and out with us and he knew I was studying AK's aviation history in grad school. It's not a sexy piece of airplane but what it represents is awesome. (The flight crew survived this crash - it was a mechanical related accident.)

Here's a close-up of the books themselves. This is the start of my SFF collection and features some Nicholas Christopher (slightly surreal, very literary, you MUST read him!), Pamela Dean and the start of the big Charles de Lint collection. I actually have read more of his books then these but I go back and reread each of these titles every few years. For all the books I have, I'm actually pretty hardcore about not keeping them unless i use them for research, have a strong sentimental attachment (more on that later) or reread them every now and again. I still weed out books every year that I might have hung onto for a decade or more. I just finally decide they can go.

The silhouette is of my son, done when he was a year old.

This is one of only two books I have duplicate copies of: TAM LIN by Pamela Dean. I first read it in the mass market edition, during my lunch hour while working for an engineering company in Fairbanks shortly after I moved north. (I was the resident go-fer; it was the job I had before going to work for the Company.) I loved everything about this book and when I saw years later that Dean had bought the remaindered hardcover copies and was selling signed editions for $10 I grabbed one right away. A couple of years ago Sharyn November reissued it as a tpb and sent me a copy (which I reviewed for my column). I kept the trade as a reading copy (plus I love the cover) but can never part with my signed edition.

Just reading the first page of this book fills me with joy.

The monkey is here because I was born in the year of the monkey and when I saw this one reading it was just way too "me" to pass up. He sits on my Retrieval Artist books, the only ones I've found thus far. Once I've read the whole collection I figure my son will be old enough to start enjoying them (he's 9 now - it's taken awhile to get these...). They are the perfect blend of SF and detective, an absolute pleasure from start to finish.

The baseball is my signed ball from the 1986 Red Sox AL Champion team. I have kept it in the case out of the sun and yet the signatures are still fading. It's killing me a little to see Jim Rice slowly slipping away. At least I still have the ball though - my brother lost his (he swears our mother threw it out when he went into the Marines but she still had his legos in the house until his daughter finally took them home a couple of years ago, so I don't think she's to blame.) The ball sits on top of what I use for bookends: glass jars full of shells from my beach back home. Some of the shells were recently collected by me, some years ago by my father and some from decades ago by my great grandmother. (They used to be in a lamp that broke so I put them in my jars.) (She collected shells in the late '60s when she moved in with my grandparents.)

More to come as I travel around the room....