We're in the middle of having our bedrooms and upstairs insulated properly, which have meant emptying every room bit by bit and decanting into the corridor and other rooms. We have a ridiculously large number of books- several hundred in every room including lavatories, corridors, and up the stairs. I've discovered books I thought we had somewhere but some of the children may not have read yet. The children had many books in their rooms that they read years ago and did not pass on to their younger siblings.
My question is, how should I arrange the books now that I have a golden opportunity to rearrange everything? Should I for example arrange them by genre? The problem with that is that I can remember as a child being pleasantly surprised time and time again by random books I picked up in random places in the house. I think that children will read things when they are ready for them if they have open access to them. I have a sneaking suspicion that arranging them by genre might encourage the children to just keep reading within a genre.
In fact, unless we're talking about books written in the last 20 years (I think that modern authors are being marketed by genre and their writing edited/steered in that direction by publishers), are genres a good way of sorting?
What do you think? Shall I just go for the children getting their all-time favourites back and replacing the rest unsorted? To sort or not to sort?