Susan Sontag

 American writer Susan Sontag (1933-2004) organized her personal library “... by subject or, in the case of literature, by language and chronologically. But never alphabetically”, she told Leslie Garis for The New York Times in 1992. “I couldn’t put Pynchon next to Plato! It doesn’t make sense.” Instead, Sontag had a section for English literature (“You need a ladder”). “It starts here, and here are the Chaucerians . . . and then comes Shakespeare, Elizabethan Stuart plays, Marlowe, Middleton, Webster, the poets . . . It’s very approximate. Here’s Beckford, William Blake and then Wordsworth. . . Here’s Byron. I have all of English literature here. There’s Oscar Wilde, and there’s Meredith and Hardy. Of course, when I get into the modern stuff you can see who I read and who I don’t. For instance, I adore V. S. Naipaul, then Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Chinese and Russian, ancient history, Judaism, a huge library of early Christianity, followed by Byzantium and the Middle Ages . . . philosophy, psychiatry and the history of medicine.” Her own books she tucked into a tiny room so she didn´t have to look at them." Lit Hub.