Where's My Book?

As I may have mentioned, I am in the midst of grad school; I'm currently working on my master's degree in Library and Information Science.Today is the first day of the fall term, and we've all been asked to do the obligatory "introduce yourself" posts on the discussion boards (have I also mentioned that my grad school program is completely online? Well, it is.) One instructor asked us to talk about something we collect and how it's organized, and a lot of people chose to talk about their book collection.

For someone who wants to be a librarian, my books are not organized at all. Well, maybe not at all; I do group them together by author. But the Steinbeck is sitting next to Bridget Jones's Diary; Gertrude Stein sits next to Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Sedaris stretches out on top of everything because I have no room on the bookshelf, yet I can't get enough of him.

So I wonder if maybe I should re-organize them.... Fiction together over here, memoir on the shelf in my bedroom, super heavy books like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare on the bottom shelf of the super sturdy bookcase...but if I did all that, would I know where things were? Or would I just be shooting myself in the foot when a friend asks to borrow Jane Eyre (because so many friends do ask for that particular book).

I think there are just way too many options; which might be why I've never really had a problem with my current system. And it may be nice for someone working in an ordered library to come home to a bit of comfortable dysfunction. Otherwise I could be like John Cusack's character from High Fidelity and arrange my books-wait for it- autobiographically.