Joel Miller, “How Do You Organize 3,000 Books? Touring My Personal Library” (Miller’s Book Review)

“A library needs a conceptual scheme to hold it together. That’s all the Dewey Decimal System is, though one designed to as generic and all-purpose as possible. I am, on the other hand, highly particular and have highly particular purposes. I also have a lot of books in terms of genre and type: history of various ages, literature, psychology, business, politics, policy, religion, biography, memoir, the arts, and more. What’s more, my library is always growing and I’m particularly interested in expanding my fiction, especially classic novels.

“The solution? I decided to merge a few categories and organize them all chronologically. This is a wonderful way to contextualize books with historical content or importance. I’ve done it for years but failed to follow the scheme in the most recent iteration of this space. I took everything down and started over.”

“Readers Pick: Their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century” (New York Times)

Readers of the New York Times have provided their top book from the 21st century. This was, in part, a response to the “expert” selections in the original list. Not surprisingly, there’s only a 39 percent overlap between the two lists. Both lists provide some intriguing possibilities for future reading.

Lucy Owen, Catriona Aitken, “Working with Roald Dahl Helped Me Find Harry Potter” (BBC News)

Barry Cunningham once asked Roald Dahl, “Mr Dahl, what is the secret of your popularity with children?”

Cunningham reports, “I just blushed to hear myself say that, and he took it seriously. He said ‘the thing you’ve got to remember Barry, is that humour is delayed fear, laughter is delayed fear.’

“And really, I didn’t understand that at the time, but if you look at the way he uses humour and the way that children use humour, perhaps sometimes it’s the only weapon they have against terrifying circumstances or people. That’s very indicative of his stories and the style of those stories.”