- Books, Books, Books -

I love books. They are also the bane of my existence. I'm swimming in them—no make that drowning in them.

In the process of tracking down some references for a book proposal I've been working on, I've ended up cleaning out my office at home. Well, almost. I now have six piles of books, each neatly stacked on the floor two to three feet high but with no place to go. So that's what, about eighteen linear feet of books. Here's the rub: all the book shelves in the house are full. I have one wall where I can replace a short bookcase with a taller one and gain maybe ten additional linear feet. But once that wall is used up, I'm not sure what I'll do.

You may think: well, move the books to your office at school. Besides the fact that I now try to spend as little time there as possible so that I can actually get some work done (the irony), I have to admit that it too is likewise swamped with books. No, make that deluged. Some have threatened to have it declared a disaster area. Me, I think of it as a creative workspace: you never know which two seemingly unrelated bits of information are going to be brought into contact with one another and spontaneously generate brilliant insight. Let entropy be your friend. That's my motto.

But I digress. I think I may well have twenty linear feet of unshelved books in my office at school. I've three or four good sized stacks on the floor. I have them stacked on the filing cabinets. My desk is submerged in them. Yes, I hardly no what to do with all these books. I would just let them float their way to insight around my office if it wasn't for the fact that I occasionally have to wade inside and find something. Finding something when you need it—that's the trouble with the creative workspace.