With any luck, I'll be in a new apartment before long, which will allow me to do one of my very favorite things -- rearrange my books. I've never felt quite at home in my current place, so the books are scattered everywhere, many still in boxes from when I moved in.

When I was younger and had fewer books, I was an alphabetical organizer. Then I moved to grouping them by subject -- fiction, poetry, science, biography, movies -- and left it at that. But in recent years, while working in some aspect of publishing, my collection has grown to the point where it resists almost any type of organization. This upsets my inner Felix Unger. It also leads me back to basic questions of how many books to keep and where to keep them.

I think my modest goal will be to return to a subject-oriented layout. For now, I will resist the urge to lose my mind and, say, organize them using the Dewey Decimal system!