Monday 5 March, 2007

The Perils of categorization

I have spent alot of time this weekend organising my books for the first time since I moved from Sydney to Melbourne six years ago. By which I mean categorising and alphabetising them. It is always amusing to see what books end up nuzzling each other. De Beauvoir, De Botton and De Sade make a good gang. And As I lay Dying next to Bridget Jones.

This organisational flourish was significant not just because it shows the burst of energy that comes (hopefully) before a storm of creativity. Nor because it heralded the final, ultimate and sacred commitment between my partner and I : the merging of our books collection. (What did we have two of? Bridget Jones Diary, The God of Small Things, The Interpreter of Maladies, Disgrace, a range of Helen Garners, one million Tim Winton's, and, embarrassingly, two of the first volume of Proust and none of the rest.) But because it raised some theoretical issues regarding the place of 'Australia'. This is the route we chose to go, but I would appreciate others thoughts on this: separate Film, Children's, Humour, Poetry, Plays, Anthology, Art, Reference, Vagina (women's health, and general erotica) and Biography. Books to do with books I am writing (India,Tibet, Buddhism, Sri Lanka, Bloomsbury). Australian fiction and overseas fiction merged together and organized alphabetically. International general non-fiction and Australian general non-fiction separated out. Now the logic in this was that there are Australian histories and cultural studies that are, obviously, very particular to Australia. However there are also books by Australians - Anna Funder's Stasiland comes to mind - that are not at all in Australian in focus. There are also very Australian biographies - let's say David Marr's Patrick White, or Don Watson's biography of Paul Keating, which are very much about Australian culture - which are still in the biography section. After prevaricating I put Funder in Australian, but the logic is then inconsistent but I'm not sure I've done the right thing. Is this just pragmatic organisation, or am I ghettoising Australia and Australian writers?

Cross-posted (without the word Vagina) at Sarsparilla.