My husband and I looked at a lot of condos last spring in search of the perfect one to invest in. One of the fun parts of this is getting to peek in on other people’s homes, on their lives really. When house shopping, you’re allowed to open closets and vanity drawers, notice where they have shoved the messes and if, perhaps, they don’t have any at all. Inevitably, I’m always drawn to the bookshelves.
What do other people read? I make assessments as I go. This one only has coffee table books. Verdict: not a reader at all, just likes the pictures. This one has shelves full of DVDs and (gasp!) VHS tapes! But even more befuddling, not a TV, or a VCR for that matter, in sight. Ummm, what? Another office held binders upon binders full of papers destined for the recycle bin, hearkening to a professional life and a time before documents were saved in the Cloud.
And then there are the ones with the copious collections of every book they ever purchased and hopefully read, just sitting there, pregnant again on the shelf. The wide array is just a trophy case to me, a testament yes, of great swathes of literature (or not) combed through over many years. But it doesn’t tell me much except how important you feel it is to keep so many books.
Most intriguing to me are the homes with neatened piles of books on the nightstand, all with bookmarks halfway in all of them, some fiction, some not, a testimony to a voracious and varied reading and learning life. All around the house there are small dog-eared collections tucked carefully away in closets and piled on the toilet tank or in baskets in the living room. A hasty retreat has left a Robert Galbraith face down on the top shelf of the coat closet and now they can’t read the next excellent chapter at the coffeeshop they’ve gone to because dammit, they forgot their book.
It makes me sad when I enter a home and see…no books. I know some people just aren’t readers, I get it and…maybe. Whatever. And I know that some have forsaken the physical bookshelf for their Kindles full of fascinating titles, that they keep private and easy to transport. Or they frugally and responsibly read all their books from the library. But I like the personality that a curated, actual bookshelf displays. Sure, it’s nice to make another notch in the reading belt and wedge the latest conquest in between others of the same height and width. I prefer to add to my ‘Books Read’ list in my current journal and if I decide I will most definitely never read it again (because really, who has time to re-read mediocre or unsatisfying books?), I will add it to my give away box or return it to the library.
My own bookshelves hold only my favorites, the ones I hope to get back to someday or that I’ve marked up and dog-eared so that I can easily return to a favorite place. This has surprised some people who know how much I read and how I prefer physical books to their digital and audio counterparts. Because while I have quite a few books, I have given away probably hundreds more, most purchased for only a dollar or two at the local thrift store. Either they or the library book sale will get my cast-offs so it’s not wasteful on my part, it’s a donation. But I would hope that looking at my shelves you would get a sense of this girl who loves YA and historical novels, art and writing books, memoirs and spiritual guides, all grouped together meaningfully, hoping to impart some creativity in their arrangement in addition to the art in their pages.