I’m currently sitting on the floor, my bookshelf towering over my head like a benevolent giant. How can I describe it to you, the feelings I have for this oversized stack of paper?
Would you laugh at me if I said that a person’s bookshelf is a map to their soul?
Maybe you would laugh. And that’s alright — this isn’t meant to be a serious matter. But I think there’s some truth to it. Because whenever I start to feel unmoored, like everything is changing too fast, I can count on my bookshelf to act as an anchor.
It makes a certain amount of sense. The books we read and love speak to who we are as people, so as our books accumulate over the years, they tend to create a timeline of our personality. I reserve a corner of my bookshelf for my most well-loved picture books for this reason, because they’re the beginning of my timeline. Children can’t delude themselves about what they enjoy, so it’s highly likely that the books we loved as children will still hold joy and meaning for us as adults.
Looking at the shelf in front of me, if asked to identify my childhood, I’d point to The Underwater Alphabet Book, The Quiltmaker’s Gift, and a tattered photocopy of a story I found at my grandma’s house, called The Story of Live Dolls. Then, for the awkward preteen years, I’d single out The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale and a lot of fantasy stories by Tamora Pierce. For high school, it’d have to be the brightly colored Japanese textbooks and The Night Circus. For college it’d be a motley collection of travelogues, Lonely Planet guides, A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver, and several thick fantasy tomes by Sarah J. Maas.
The point of this list isn’t the books themselves, but that I can easily identify them. If you want to know what you really like, look at your bookshelf: I happen to love fantasy, and I’ve loved it ever since I could read. It most likely started with stories like The Story of Live Dolls, and it’s endured all the way up to the last book I read (The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera). Through the titles stamped on the spines of my books, I can trace the person I used to be, and how she grew into the person I am now.
Japanese textbooks, Japanese historical fiction, Japanese cultural studies, Japanese art history treatises, and manga also litter my shelves, so it’s safe to say that Japan is another thing I love. Then there’s all the books on travel — there are nine travel guides on this bookshelf, accompanied by nine travelogues. The two other trends I can identify through book titles alone are creative writing (I have so many books about writing, you guys. Which is funny, because books about writing are a self-enclosed loop created by writers. Writers like to write about writing, and writers like to read about writing. And no one else cares. The fact that writing books continue to be published is a small miracle), and cooking. Not because I’m a particularly good cook, to be honest, but because I’ve always enjoyed food writing.
If you take all of these themes from my bookshelf — fantasy, Japan, travel, writing, and food — then you’ve actually got the main aspects of my personality in a nutshell. These are the things that truly fascinate me, that pull me in over and over again. I honestly couldn’t come up with a more succinct list if I tried.
But that’s the beauty of a bookshelf. Because of my books, I don’t have to try to come up with that list. It’s already there, in organic form, whenever I pause to consider what I want to read next. My bookshelf is a map reflecting where I’ve been and, in some ways, predicting where I’ll go. I’ve used my bookshelf as a grounding force before, whenever I’ve doubted if I truly know myself. (Asking if you really know yourself is a hazard of middle school. And high school. And college… Perhaps, after a certain point, it’s just a symptom of being a living, growing, changing person.) And whenever I wonder who I am, my bookshelf has answers.
This is, maybe, why I feel some anxiety whenever I’m forced to leave my books. Next week, I’ll be heading back to school for my last year of college. I can’t take many books with me, due to practical considerations (namely, weight restrictions for suitcases on planes). The books I have at school are, also due to practical considerations, mainly ones I’ve accumulated in the last three years of college. They serve as a less complete picture of who I am — if my bookshelf at home is a neatly labeled photo album, then my bookshelf at school is a handful of hastily-taken polaroids. I don’t love the books I have at college any less, but they can’t calm me in the midst of an existential crisis. They don’t feel like friends, like a chorus of understanding paper voices. They’re simply… books.
Of course, this is a temporary situation. Someday soon, I hope, I’ll be able to consolidate all my books somewhere less transient than a college dorm room. But that will require a full-time job, an apartment, a moving truck, and multiple Ikea bookshelves. It sounds like a mundane goal, but I like to imagine that a true sign of adulthood is the knowledge that all of your books are in one place and won’t be going anywhere.
But next week, I’ll be leaving my bookshelf behind, and I’ll miss it like an old friend. I can’t do anything about this, nor do I think it a particular tragedy, in the grand scheme of things. If you want to have adventures, some sacrifices must be made. But this knowledge isn’t stopping me from sitting on the floor in front of my bookshelf, writing this love letter to it.
Oh, you oversized stack of paper. I have so much affection for you.
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