This has been a growing gripe of mine as well, progressing through my second playthrough of the game.
Because of how terrible the UI is, I've stopped bothering to do things like pick up books, crafting materials, and containers entirely.
Don't forget how painful identifying large numbers of items is, the fact that you have to hover over items to see which are unID'd, containers being impossible to sort, and there being no item locking feature.
