Waiting to Be Read... Some Day

I've had a productive past couple of days, personally, for some reason. My home office, which has been a semi-disorganized collection of heaps since sometime last April, is now mostly put in order, and I even went through all of the books that have accumulated.

I had a basic system in mind up until now (probably a bit to complex to explain here), but it had broken down into dysfunctional piles that made it impossible to access parts of the office. Now the books are all in order: unread ones are now divided along the fiction/nonfiction line, with the fiction upstairs and the nonfiction downstairs in my office. And those three shelves of unread nonfiction are organized by topic, more or less.

Here's some of the evidence:


The first shelf is mixed nonfiction on the left, general history to the right of center, and food-related on the far right.


The second shelf is about two-thirds black history and ruminations on white supremacy, segueing into feminism/gender studies and finally class and income inequality on the right. (So basically, this shelf holds the triad of race, class, and gender.)


The final shelf contains biographies and memoirs on the left with hell-in-a-handbasket content in the middle, then transitions into activism and solutions on the right.

The climate-change books are located elsewhere in the office (and most of them have already been read). The rest of the office shelves are full of plant and garden books, plus a section on art.

This exercise led me to pick out one book among the many to start reading: historian Edward Baptist's tome The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.