Everybody is so gloomy these days. We need a good literary meme to cheer us up. Earlier today, Fimoculous reminded us of the cheery art of spine novels--an easy way to reorganize your bookshelf and do some writing at the same time.

For fifteen years, artist Nina Katchadourian has arranged stacks books into mini-stories, putting their spines in order so that the titles created short, short stories. Follow this link for examples from her Sorted Books project.

My favorite spine novel takes stacks these seven titles, creating a mini-horror movie: "A Day at the Beach, The Bathers, Shark 1, Shark 2, Shark 3, Sudden Violence, and Silence." Feeling blue? It's nothing a little spine fiction-izing can't fix.