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:
- Science fiction & fantasy
- Other fiction
- LDS non-fiction
- Self-improvement
- Writing & publishing
- Arabic language
- History & current events
- 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.
