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I got hooked on watching a show from around ten years ago called Hoarders. As you may imagine from the title, this is about people who are the polar opposite of tidy. If you, dear Goodreader, exploded a bomb inside your house, the resulting vista of destruction would still be 100% more organised than these hoarders.

I realised that I myself hoard books. But very neatly. Most of them are in the loft. The first section is fiction, arranged, obviously, by author’s last name. I’ve read all these. I am thinking that Marie Kondo might possibly give me a hard time about that. She could reasonably ask why I need to keep those, since there is no possibility I could ever have the time to reread any of them, and in any case, I rated quite a few of them one or two stars, so why would I ever want to. This is where me and the hoarders are not so far apart. They keep stuff they won’t ever use, they seem to imagine vaguely that they will be able to live another hundred years and be able to get round to all these projects and sort out all these towering piles of broken furniture and rain damaged guitars and patch all those rat-gnawed doileys.

In the fiction section those names beginning with Mc give me mild anxiety �� should I assume there is an A between the M and the c? If I don’t those authors will find themselves exiled from their clan members whose names begin Mac. So I assume, but trepidaciously. The short story collections come at the end of the fiction section. There is no sensible way of ordering them. Very sorry but no one remembers who edits an anthology so their names are useless. After fiction comes Memoirs, Politics, Theology and History. These have their own idiosyncrasies which I shan’t bore you with. After those comes some great shelves of graphic novels and then science fiction followed by my Shelf of Shame : true crime. I’m sure Ray Bradbury shudders to find himself within arm’s reach of John Wayne Gacy (whereas Kurt Vonnegut smiles sardonically) but I am not running Borges�� Library of Babel here. So that is the loft.

Downstairs you will find bookcases dedicated to biographies (arranged alphabetically by subject name not by author name), books about books, and books about music. There are memoirs and biographies in the music book section �� I know! What a contradiction! Shouldn’t the music biographies be shelved with all the other biographies? Should Joni Mitchell come between Grace Metalious and Anais Nin? How delicious!. Should Captain Beefheart interpose himself between Samuel Beckett and Saul Bellow? Perish the thought. So after much head scratching I assigned the musicians to their own ghetto. Then finally I have some shelves dedicated to those most intimidating books of all �� the To Be Reads. They glower at me every day. I know what they are thinking �� why haven’t you read me yet? Eight years I have been patiently waiting! Am I no longer pretty enough? Some of the older ones watch newer arrivals plucked off the tbr shelf almost immediately �� I can hear their pages gnashing.

I’m almost sure Marie Kondo would tell me point blank to get rid of half of these books. So I’ll put my copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up carefully on my tbr shelf and benignly ignore it for a few years.