In setting up my new study, I did something with my books I've never done before in the twenty-odd years that I've been building this library: I alphabetized them. Not all of them, actually. That would take a week. I've brought down to the study what I'm unofficially calling the canon: roughly two hundred books that have been influential in some way over the past two decades, even if in some cases I haven't actually, you know, read them. The rest remain scattered randomly through the bookshelves in the rest of the house.