@kcoyle Those are the rules we're avoiding by using Author First Name - much less thinking required!

@Infrapink

@arratoon Haha - nice. Screwy decimal indeed. I shall be borrowing that!

@Infrapink Ah! Delighted to learn it's not just me. I like avoiding exactly those kind of questions, having to work out where, say, the Icelandic authors are, etc.

@anderslund @bettina @murena Seconded! Var lige på vej til at sige det samme.

@datenhalde And I bet her pizza slices are excellently cut too. Good for her. Trailblazing in the kitchen.

@fgraver I'm after the same thing. Worldwide literature, worldwide fiction, by authors diverse in age and genre and gender - books as a window, not a mirror.

@coolcalmcollected So many ingredients that are so much easier to chop this way!

@fgraver

"If there’s a mystery of any sort and a protagonist attempting to solve said mystery, it’s crime."

That's a great example of the kind of genre-categorising I've never been good at. Even when I'm browsing the library online, I dont have an instinct for Thriller contra Mystery contra Crime.

@fgraver Agreed.

@nieuemma I only joined the Fediverse in 2022, but that's still long enough and enough reply threads ago for me to know that I will not be sharing a list of Ingredients I Chop With Scissors Instead of A Knife with the Fediverse

@fgraver This is why wondering 'Is literary fiction a separate category?' is annoying, frustrating and entertaining, all at the same time. And unanswerable. I can't define LitFic, but I know it when I read it. And I also know that Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels are not regarded as LitFic and I think they should be. The wisdom and insight and social advocacy in among all the laugh-aloud lines - a Nobel Prize-worth of literature in his body of work.

@kimlockhartga You probably know the Height system so instinctively well now that switching some to By Author might just make them harder to find. Your system is a sensible, functional system.

@fgraver

"And they are all Literary Fiction, seeing as they are all fiction. And literature."

Ok now you're just openly trolling me.

@kasperd Hahaha that took me a second, then made me laugh literally out loud. Now I really really really want this to be @kimlockhartga's actual system. Looking up every writer's height on Wikipedia before shelving their book.

@CarstenBoll

"Tænk på, at der er gået 100.000 års omtanke ind I den lille krumme kniv, fx, og de ting lige præcis den er god til. Er da næsten respektløst overfor ens forfædre at ignorere det"

Oh no that's a great point. Det er lige ved, at jeg bliver nødt til at genoverveje. Eller i det mindste at vise en smule mere forståelse for Gourmet Kokkens synspunkt.

@fgraver Now I'm the one staring at this toot with a thousand-yard stare. Genre would traumatise me. So many books with mixed genres, or no clear genre, that would require decision-making. I would have to think, and I don't like thinking if I can avoid it. And now I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight because this has reignited the trauma of a discussion I once had about whether Literary Fiction is its own genre or not. Never resolved.

@kimlockhartga Height is another fine system. I used to shelve by geography. It was fine when I was a teenager, but as my reading broadened year by year, decade by decade, there was too much ad hoc decision-making involved. So many authors with mixed cultural and actual backgrounds, books in different translations, authors with books at different stages in different places in their migrant lives. So I finally switched to forenames. First names and height: far less uncertainty!

@CarstenBoll Haha - det lyder osgå som en Thousand-mile Stare situation. Jeg har en høj tærksel for autodidatiske køkkenvaner, men selv jeg synes ikke, at en sløv brødkniv er oplagt til at skære kylling med. Ræk hende en saks næste gang!

@liebach It is, it is. I thank you for recognising this, for seeing how hard it is to be an unsung book-shelving genius. They'd better make me look pretty in that statue they erect of me after I'm gone, sculpted in remorse when my first-name alphabetic system is used in every library in the world.

@squaremoon That's what I think too. They're sad they didn't think of it themselves, all those inefficient years of inefficient chopping with knives.
@TwoClownsEating