Rhyming order

In Alphabetically by title, I suggested you could make it more fun by doing it backwards - i.e. by the last letters in the title. And from that, of course, there's only a skip, jump and stumble to organizing by rhyme.

Shades of Grey with Remains of the Day. The Subtle Knife with Nightlife. The Long Good-Bye with The Moor's Last Sigh. The Fifth Elephant with Valiant. By The Mountain Bound with Move Underground. The Onion Girl and The Windup Girl and The Icarus Girl. The City & The City with Freedom and Necessity... perhaps? Not a perfect rhyme, is it. And it will only get worse. This imperfect system will have many, many imperfections. The many forced rhymes will make you feel like a very poor poet indeed – and I'm also afraid to try it because I fear I would buy books just because they rhyme with books I already own.

I should point out, perhaps, that I'm not the only one who has come up with this insane idea. In The Library at Night (I read it in Swedish, Nattens bibliotek), Alberto Manguel describes China's imperial libraries in the first century CE. There the books were organized 1) graphically, and 2) by the rhyme in the last syllable in the last word of the title. Possibly, it's easier in Chinese? (Mandarin? What was the imperial language 2,000 years ago?) But it would be fun to try, wouldn't it?