Two bloggers I know recently did an introduction to their bookshelves blog post. While it wasn’t exactly a blog tag, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and do one too! 🙂 You can find their posts here: E.G. Bella and Liesl Brunner. You should definitely check out their posts and sites!

This post is pretty much looking at all the books I own and dividing them into categories. I counted it up and it totaled 109! Since I’m married and we share everything, I included all books my husband and I own, regardless of whether he or I primarily reads them. Let’s check the categories.

Fiction or Nonfiction? After counting and double checking, we own 92 non fiction and 17 fiction books.

This did not surprise me at all. While I read a pretty equal amount of fiction and non-fiction, I usually get my fiction books from the library or borrow them from friends. The non-fiction books we own tend to be ones you can’t find at a regular library or reference type books that are nice to have on hand. Since I also combined the books my husband and I own, I’m pretty sure all the books he contributed to our shelves when we got married were non-fiction and mine were a mix.

Genre. I sorted our books into these main genres:

Theology— 31 of our books fit into this category. While I have not read most of the deep spiritual books we own, I would like to. Since this is the main type of book my husband reads and owns, it makes sense that this would be a huge category. A couple books I put in this category are Desiring God by John Piper, Prayer and Spiritual Warfare by Charles Spurgeon, Radical by David Platt, and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law.

Devotionals— The line between theology and devotional book was a little hard to draw with some books, but this genre mostly included less deep Christian books, or day to day prayers or studies. I also included Bible study books in this category. It totaled at 11 books including Pray for the World (Operation World), If by Amy Carmichal, My utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, and Face to Face by Kenneth Boa.

Biography and History— 10 of the books we own fit into this category. Some of them are modern biographies such as Unplanned by Abby Johnson and Kisses from Katie by Katie Davis Majors. Others are older such as 21 Servants of Sovereign Joy by John Piper and Mimosa by Amy Carmichal.

Marriage, godly manhood and womanhood— Since we got married a little over a year ago, we have 9 of these! A couple of them are Preparing for Marriage God’s Way by Wayne A. Mack, For Men only and For Women only by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn, and Home-Making by J.R. Miller.

Writing Related— I have 9 writing related books, my favorite being Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne and King. (I talked about this book in my last email update). C.S. Lewis’ On Stories also fit into this category as well as a couple helpful books by Joanna Penn, a mini dictionary, and a rhyming dictionary.

Historical Fiction and Historical Romance— There were 8 of these, and I’ve actually only read 4 of them. 🙂 For such a Time by Kate Breslin, My Dearest Deitrich by Amanda Barratt, A Lineage of Grace by Francine Rivers, and Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers were excellent (with a couple CW for the last one). Sometime soon I would like to read Deep Down, The Coral Island, and Blue lights by R.M. Ballantyne and The Hidden Land by Eden Southworth.

Fantasy/Dystopian— In some ways this category of 8 books could have just been labeled “other fiction” but it fit into the Fantasy/Dystopian category well enough to call it that. It includes Daughter of Kings by Isabella Auer (this book was written by a friend a couple months before she passed away due to DIPG), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum, The Giver quartet by Lois Lowry (technically I only own 3 of the quartet 🙂 ), and The Remnant Trilogy by Tim Chaffey and K Marie Adams. The last one I wasn’t sure whether to put this into dystopian or historical fiction as it is about the life of Noah before the flood. Technically that makes it historical fiction, but it is speculative enough to put in a different category. I can highly recommend all of these!

Life, Outdoors, Survival— Some people would have probably divided up these 11 books differently, but since they overlap so much in my husband and my lives, I clumped books like The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Living by Abigail R. Gehring, The Baby Book by Dr. William Sears, How to Build Your Dream Cabin in the Woods by J Wayne Fears and Survival Wisdom & Know-How by Hachette book group into one big category. These are not necessarily books you read from cover to cover but they are great reference books for projects and life.

Other— There were 12 books that didn’t exactly fit anywhere else, such as a couple cookbooks, math charmers, and a swim coaching book. I could only have so many categories. 🙂

I decided to skip the target audience and classic or non classic questions and charts from the other blogs since I elaborated a little more on my books and neither of these questions were very applicable to the books we own.

So lastly, Hardcover or softcover? 29 of the books we own are hardcover, 77 are softcover, and 2 are digital/e-book. We don’t usually prefer electronic version, but other than that, I don’t have a huge preference for hardcover or softcover. 🙂

Our Bookshelves. Here are pictures of our two main bookshelves. There are a few books not on these shelves, but the majority of our books end up in one of these two places. 🙂

I hope you enjoyed getting to hear a little bit about the books we own! Maybe you will find a couple you’re interested in reading or re-reading. If you’re a blogger feel free to jump on and create a post about the books you own! 🙂