This is a very, very difficult procedure for meticulous OCD people like me. Here I'll lay out some common routes and remark on all of them.
Genre: The problem with this methodology is quite obvious if you do not cross-over your shelves. Since many books fall under multiple genres, it is very very difficult to organize your shelves effectively with this. Only several genres could be categorized well here. The rest would overlap so often or be so incorrectly categorized that the purpose of cleanliness is already contradicted.
Trope/Reactionary Sentences: Funny one-bit jargon, but literally useless for organization unless you're prepared to handle over 25+ shelves. But then now you'll need shelves of shelves, in order to handle the amount of shelves!
Published Date Time Frames: This is nice if you like organizing your books and mindset by chronology. The more you read within certain eras, the more you can be split up the time frames on your shelves. However, this doesn't really help collect titles which share common ideas or genres. And if you go purely by this route, it's nothing that the "Sort by Pub. Date" column in the "All" shelf doesn't already do (save for the fact that rereleases don't indicate the original pub. dates, so you will want to organize that manually).
Alphabetical Groups: Same remarks as the date time frames.
Since there's problems with all, here's the solution which currently works best for me. It's a bit fudgy, and it keeps progressing to something new.
Literary Forms: Ideally, I would organize everything by shared common ideas. But as stated with the problems with the pure genre route, such a naive implementation would not work, and so I do the next best thing: the format of the medium. I also have localized genres shelved in this manner, which are more naturally categorized this way. This includes technical books, nonfiction, etc. Others include the form of its presentation, i.e., play, short story, novel. I don't include a novella bookshelf because it requires too much work to distinguish which books belong to novella vs novel (and this also crosses over to more subjective classifications).
What makes this organization technique superior is that the classifications are objective and far easier to handle. It's a simple fact check that allows one to break down large numbers of texts up into more manageable components. And unlike genres, a work can only belong to one of the shelves at a time! :)
Genre: The problem with this methodology is quite obvious if you do not cross-over your shelves. Since many books fall under multiple genres, it is very very difficult to organize your shelves effectively with this. Only several genres could be categorized well here. The rest would overlap so often or be so incorrectly categorized that the purpose of cleanliness is already contradicted.
Trope/Reactionary Sentences: Funny one-bit jargon, but literally useless for organization unless you're prepared to handle over 25+ shelves. But then now you'll need shelves of shelves, in order to handle the amount of shelves!
Published Date Time Frames: This is nice if you like organizing your books and mindset by chronology. The more you read within certain eras, the more you can be split up the time frames on your shelves. However, this doesn't really help collect titles which share common ideas or genres. And if you go purely by this route, it's nothing that the "Sort by Pub. Date" column in the "All" shelf doesn't already do (save for the fact that rereleases don't indicate the original pub. dates, so you will want to organize that manually).
Alphabetical Groups: Same remarks as the date time frames.
Since there's problems with all, here's the solution which currently works best for me. It's a bit fudgy, and it keeps progressing to something new.
Literary Forms: Ideally, I would organize everything by shared common ideas. But as stated with the problems with the pure genre route, such a naive implementation would not work, and so I do the next best thing: the format of the medium. I also have localized genres shelved in this manner, which are more naturally categorized this way. This includes technical books, nonfiction, etc. Others include the form of its presentation, i.e., play, short story, novel. I don't include a novella bookshelf because it requires too much work to distinguish which books belong to novella vs novel (and this also crosses over to more subjective classifications).
What makes this organization technique superior is that the classifications are objective and far easier to handle. It's a simple fact check that allows one to break down large numbers of texts up into more manageable components. And unlike genres, a work can only belong to one of the shelves at a time! :)