What Our Bookshelves Say About Us

 

If you’re like me, the bookshelves in your house are overflowing with titles, some of which you haven’t gotten around to reading yet. In our house, we have bookshelves in my home office and upstairs in our loft area. My daughter and son also have bookshelves in their rooms. 

While perusing our family book collection, I was thinking about how you can learn a lot about a person when scanning their shelves. For me, it’s evident I’ve enjoyed reading suspense from as far back as my teen years. While I lost most of my childhood books in one of my many moves, several years ago I began collecting paperbacks of my old favorites by authors Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike from thrift stores, public library book sales, and book resale websites. As a true crime writer and podcaster, I would be remiss without my shelf of Ann Rule titles and other memoirs in the genre. 

I’m also a fan of the beach read, as evidenced by my large collection of Elin Hilderbrand novels (I swear I’m going to visit Nantucket one day!) My daughter and I both love Jodi Picoult and noticed have split our collection of her novels between us—some reside in my office and others are in her bedroom. Even my cookbooks tell a story—I prefer simple meals with clean ingredients that don’t take a lot of time to make (thank you, Gina Homolka of Skinnytaste and Lisa Lillien of Hungry Girl!) 

As an aspiring author who got her start in freelance writing, I have a wide variety of craft books, from how to pitch magazine articles to writing the perfect query letter. My husband, who has spent his life in Corporate America, has his favorite books like The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. 

Over the years I’ve had a lot of books gifted to me, from my time as both a magazine editor and book blogger. Every few years I try to cull my shelves and select a box of titles to either give away or donate. My office would be buried if I didn’t. But looking back on the books I choose to keep, a lot of them are within my preferred genres (book club fiction, suspense/thrillers, and historical fiction). I also have a few random textbooks from college because I enjoyed the material and didn’t want to give away the books (looking at you, anthology of English Romantic poetry!) 

Then there’s the “To Be Read” pile—don’t we all have that? Mine has books like The Measure by Nikki Erlick that my son read for a class, but I want to read now, First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston, The Celebrants by Stephen Rowley, and Home Before Dark by Riley Sager. Wonder if I can convince my book club to read any of these soon? So, let’s see, to sum it up, I like nostalgia from my childhood, enjoy learning the writing craft through how-to books, focus on healthy eating, am fascinated by true crime, get swayed easily by book club recommendations, and never want to be without my next read. 

What do your bookshelves say about you? 

Renee Roberson is an award-winning writer who also produces the true crime podcast, Missing in the Carolinas.

1 comment book club selections, book recommendations, choosing what to read, Renee Roberson, the love of books