I'm not sure if I understand your question well (what do you mean by making your icons sortable?).
Here a printscreen from my library, maybe you'll find some inspiration
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I basically use two 'kinds' of icons.
I have one column (Languages) where icons pretty much replaced the text (although the rule for that is a bit more complex, including checking one thing in another column).
And I add icons to the title column (displayed in my library on the very left), to indicate a couple of other facts ('on my device', 'read', 'read and highly rated'). This way I can limit the number of the columns displayed in my default view (e.g. I don't need a separate column to display whether I've read the book). For me, this works.