Rainbow Bookshelves and a lil bit of Link Love

Reading across the spectrum

When I first met Nate, he lived in a sprawling ranch house with a gaggle of other guys all somewhere in their own journeys of divorce, separation, and addiction. The primary bath was painted burnt orange by the previous owner and she also had a closet, I kid you not, the size of a bedroom. It was lined on four walls with shelves and rods with an island of drawers in the middle. My husband-to-be didn’t even own a proper bed or couch, but every single shelf in that closet was stacked floor to ceiling with books.

When we were packing up the house to sell a few weeks before our wedding, I was tasked with the closet (Let’s be honest, I probably tasked myself with this because you can tell a lot about a man by their books.). I sorted through Dickens and Augustine and Lewis and systematic theology and science-fiction and old atlases that nearly crumbled in my hands. By the time the boxes were sealed up and stashed in the storage unit we’d use until we had a home in Denver, there were about forty of them. Eight of them were from my bookshelves, the rest were his.

When we closed on our home in Denver, it was a quirky house that had been added onto four times since it was first built in the 1800s. As a consequence of these additions, there was a room right in the middle of the house with no windows. It was more of a room one passed through than used. It seemed like the right place for five floor to ceiling Billy bookcases from IKEA. The night we finally unpacked our boxes of books and commingled them on the shelves I quipped that we were finally one flesh.

Because it was such a dark room, I wanted it to feel clean and spacious, uncluttered and bright, and so we organized the books by color. The Internet lost their minds. This was nearly a decade ago, probably at the height of rainbow resourcing one’s bookshelves and it was a trend that had its vocal supporters and dissenters. It seemed that if one was a serious reader, they only sorted by subject or alphabet. Only those who considered books to be superfluous material objects would consider sorting by ROYGBIV.

But I loved it. Sure, I felt the pressure to conform, to be taken seriously. I am, after all, a serious reader and my husband is an even more serious reader, and I’m not ignorant of the clout many attribute to their shelves and shelves of bound up literature.

When we moved suddenly nine months later—and a whole host of difficult experiences later—and unpacked our books in a rental house outside of D.C., I cared little about anything and hardly even shelved them by subject. I barely acknowledged our books for a year.

Before our move a year later to Texas, I stated I would not be moving the—at this point—nearly 50 boxes of books. I began a stack in our entryway that grew to my height and began six more stacks. We dropped all the books off at a nearby McKays before our move and brought with us only about 25 boxes. We got rid of commentaries from the church fathers (I still kick myself for this) and sets of classics, piles of Advance Reader Copies I’d been sent from writer friends, and fiction we’d never picked up after finishing. We let go of theology we felt meh about and popular paperbacks we’d never read. It felt good, like a fresh start.

I sorted by subject on our shelves in Texas.

Between graduate school and Nate’s love for poetry and deep dives into theology & sexuality in recent years, our stacks have ballooned again. I feel ambivalent about it mostly these days because we did the equivalent of burning the ships when we moved here and burned our book boxes finally. There is no plan of a move on our horizon and so the shelves once again are stocked.

But two weeks ago the piles were getting . . . aggressive and I declared an organization necessary. We pulled everything off the shelves in my sunroom office and upstairs, sorted through every book on the living room shelves and kitchen shelves. I tackled my office while Nate did upstairs and the living room. The kitchen table was reserved for books we’d be giving to our favorite used bookstore in Ottawa—and a few I’m holding back for my plan of building a Little Free Library on our dead end road.

Above the row of windows in the sunroom I organized the library of spiritual formation from violet to brown, a full spectrum of color. Behind my desk, I organized memoirs similarly, a downward gradient of hues. As I sorted and shelved, held every single book in my hands, I realized I’ve actually read almost every one of them. These books are not material objects of clout or even objects about which I think someday-I’ll-get-around-to-it. I’ve held them all in my hands and the words have gone down in me. I take books seriously and words even more seriously and also I have better color recall than title or author. I remember the book about walking had an orange spine and the book about focus had a yellow one and that one book about stages of our spiritual life is a bright kelly green.

Be gone moralistic pietism about book organization.

I’m here to taste the rainbow.

I wanted to share that Substack (the site that hosts me here) has rolled out a new referral program for paying subscribers, which means free things for you!

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It means a lot, a lot to me when you share what you read here. Ours is a relationship of trust, but that trust can feel tenuous at times for me. So it really helps the division of labor in our relationship when you share my work with others =)

Now, back to some interesting things I’ve read recently.

𓆸 I thought this was so beautiful.

𓆸 If you live in Michigan.

𓆸 From

Lisa Hensley

on Ted Lasso and Eschatology.

𓆸 If friendship in your forties is as bewildering as it has been for me.

𓆸 I’m always here for a good list from my elders.

𓆸 On viewing our spiritual stories and church journeys.

𓆸 You too? Me too.

Have you ordered my latest book? A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and Wish Someone Would Ask Us. Available now, wherever books are sold: Amazon | Baker Book House | Bookshop

Also available: Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

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