I think the way the teachers teach also matters a lot. I loved doing novel studies with good teachers, but I was miserable doing them with my high school English teacher(small town, so same teacher for all grades). She was one of those teachers who marked us based on how much we agreed with her, and did some other stuff that made me feel defensive before the novel studies even started.

When you get one teacher who grades like that, it can ruin future teachers for you as well, because there will always be anxiety about being punished for having the “incorrect” opinion that stifles a persons ability to have fun and be creative.

I don’t know how much I would have even picked up on that if it weren’t for my grumpy jerk college lit teacher who gave me average marks until I wrote a scathing paper tearing apart a novel study that pissed me off and got the best grade I’d ever had lol.

I don’t have a lot of space right now, so I organize my books mainly by height so I can stack more books on top, and I keep a spreadsheet catalogue of all of my books including their location and whether or not I’ve read them.